BlueGriffonTM

The next-generation Web Editor
based on the rendering engine of Firefox

Thinking at loud

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02Mar

JSCSSP

14:14 - By BlueGriffon - Thinking at loud - 3 comments

Nvu had a strong limitation, because of Gecko. It could only edit CSS styles understandable by the embedded version of Gecko. This is something I don't want for BlueGriffon because I think it does not make sense to make a content editor for the Web that is restricted to Gecko-based browsers. I want users to be able to manipulate a UI that will create -moz-transform but also -webkit-transform. And I also want users to be able to edit stylesheets that include both properties while the -webkit-* are never present in Gecko's CSS OM (and that's normal). I don't need to cascade, I want to preserve all rules and all declarations even multiple declarations of the same property, I want to preserve comments as much as possible (ie between rules and between declarations), I want to preserve CSS parsing errors. The only extra thing I need is a resolver for shorthands.

So I just started my own CSS parser. It'll parse a string containing a stylesheet and will return CSSOM-like objects with the necessary extensions. It'll live inside the CSS Inspector sidebar of BlueGriffon but I will probably make it MPL.

01Mar

CSS 'font-weight' and UI

16:35 - By BlueGriffon - Thinking at loud - 11 comments

CSS is so cool. So cool. But not in terms of UI for a CSS editor...

  • let's suppose you can have your text 'bold' or 'normal'; one checkbox or checkboxButton is enough, and you can have this button live with other buttons like italic, underline and others
  • let's suppose now you can have your text 'bold', 'normal or unspecified ; a few options here:
    1. one checkbox to say the boldness is specified or not and a checkbox/checkboxButton for bold
    2. two checkboxes/checkboxButtons for 'bold' and 'normal'; property is unspecified when both are unchecked
    3. a menulist with three choices
  • let's suppose now, and that's the CSS real case that matters to me, boldness can take the values 'bold', 'normal', 'bolder', 'lighter', 'inherit', 'initial', 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 or can be unspecified... The two reasonable choices here are:
    1. one checkbox to say the boldness is specified or not and a menulist
    2. a menulist where 'unspecified' is one of the options

In other terms, offering the full power of the 'font-weight' CSS property to a CSS editor will necessarily suck in terms of UI (yeah, forcing a menulist when most users will only use the 'bold' choice just sucks)... I am even tempted to have two modes in the CSS editor, basic and advanced. Pffff....

Ideas, suggestions?

03Oct

Speaking of tables

16:04 - By BlueGriffon - Thinking at loud

One of the nice features of text editors is table formatting. Think MS Word and its Table Autoformat dialog. It's very easy to implement that in BlueGriffon... Hehe :-)