[Mozile] Re: idea for powerful, but easy functionality: 'style marker' see URL

[Ruud Steltenpool]

I'll try to explain:

First forget technology, think mechanical typewriter, paper and
highlighter/magic marker and imagine:
You write down your book/story/report/website/letter/whatever text on the
typewriter. For a big part because of the tool, you don't worry about
visual style. When you're done pounding the keys, you staple the result
together and put a multi-colored collection of highlighters/magic markers
next to it on the desk. Now with these markers you don't go coloring the
document to the final result you're aiming at, but create an intermediate
step first: You use the different colors to mark up parts of the text, so
you can distinguish them for the different things they are (to become):
title, heading, abbreviation, quote, chapter title, differences in fonts,
paragraphs, etc. Done with that you take a fresh .....sheet of paper and
use all the colors you've used on the document to divide it up in equal
areas. Now within the colored areas you write down what you want to
magically happen to the text marked up with that specific color; yes
you're writing a STYLEsheet, so we're also giving the description in every
colored area a classname or something else to identify it by. Now take out
your magic stick, wrap the stylesheet around it and with it tap the
stapled-together and marked up document while saying:"replace the colors
with the associated stylesheet reference". And if you have a whole
collection of these stylesheets already from previous work and are a real
Harry Potter, you could save yourself some work.

Because not everybody has a mechanical typewriter, and maybe not even a
magic stick, i thought the digital equivalent might be nice too. So years
ago i hacked together something that did that, sort of. Though the
JavaScript code (selection, something, search+replace in HTMLsource,
something) code is about 100% useless now, it then did work at least
enough to produce some screenshots to illustrate the idea:
http://steltenpower.com/web_crap/in_web_edit/screenshots/

So basically it comes down to:
applying defined styles through quick mass highlighting.

GUI-wise it only takes a dropdown for color, a dropdown for style, a
stylesheetURL textfield (so not as much as in my screenshots).

I think it fits Mozile for making your most used actions quick and simple
and leaving the rest to other tools, plus often you want to refrain from
directly using <b>,<i>,<u> anyway, cause you then throw away some
semantics and flexibility.

I hope it is all clear now and you like the idea. If not, at least i've
written it down properly somewhere now.

Ruud

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James A. Overton james at overton.ca, Sun Mar 26 12:24:38 EST 2006:

You've mentioned this before on the mailing list. I'm afraid I still
don't quite understand what your tool is supposed to do, and I don't
see any code available on your site. Could you please explain it to us?
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> http://www.steltenpower.com/web_crap/in_web_edit/