Re: Editing and formatting characters

[bstell netscape com (Brian Stell)]

Owen Taylor wrote:

> The basic situation where I see a need for handling editing in
> invisible-formatting-characters mode is that someone gets a document
> that has these characters in it for some reason and fires it up
> in their text editor.
>
> I don't want to default to always displaying the formatting characters
> because a) that would be confusing to novices  b) that would be
> disruptive to actually reading the text. So, we need a reasonable
> way of handling normal editing operations with invisible formatting
> characters.
>
> I believe having invisible cursor positions is confusing and if you
> really want to edit the formatting characters in detail, they need to
> be visible, so I'd like to find a reasonable solution of automatically
> handling the formatting characters when editing the surrounding
> characters.

Making it as easy as possible for the novice is always a good
goal. However I wonder if a novice user editing a document with
hidden formatting controls is not going to be be confused regardless
of where one puts the cursor. Imagine what a "bizarre" behavior the
novice will experience when they delete a [PDF] as a side effect of
what they thought was a simple character delete.

One of the positive aspects of having a logical cursor position for
hidden characters is that the novice at least "knows something is
funny".

Would a cursor change when next to a hidden character be useful?

Would displaying the "hidden" character when it is next to the cursor
be useful? Perhaps as a bubble?

I'm glad to see others working on i18n so what ever you decide is
okay with me.

Brian