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On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Peter da Silva wrote:
> If context menus weren't under the control of applications that make such
> a hash out of consistently providing appropriate ones, that would probably
> be OK, but they're not.
Yeah, but imagine: if interfaces were consistent, this list might not even
exist. The horror!
> In my ideal GUI, the application would provide a list of menu items and
> enable-disable events, and the display manager would handle presenting them
> and selecting which ones were in the context menu under the guidance of the
> end-user. The display manager would also be responsible for the presentation
> of most other standard controls, and any developer who tried to fake them
> by using bitmaps without an airtight technical case would get to experience
> JWZ's audio-cock technology.
You've obviously thought about this aspect of desktops more than I. I
tend to get most pissed about the total lack of metadata management.
> There's lots of options: drag-and-drop the selection, maintain a clipboard
> stack, use button 3 to copy or paste depending on the selection status,
> use a context menu (paste selection), etc etc etc...
>
> Oh, yes, you'd have a three-button mouse with a Xerox-style layout (select,
> alternate select, menu).
Okay, I see.
> > How would you use this to select some text, cut it, select
> > some other text, and paste in?
>
> Depending on how the stack works:
>
> Select, select, pop the selection stack, paste.
Ugh.
> Select, push the selection stack, select, pop the selection stack.
This would be much better.
> > Well, the cool thing about Be's implementation that really moved it beyond
> > just a detail was that the sending and receiving apps could essentially
> > agree on the most sophisticated, appropriate format.
>
> Other than X11, doesn't everyone do this?
Not that I can tell. If I select text in a web browser, does it ever get
pasted as anything other than plain text? RTF or html or anything? I
know that apps can paste sophisticated stuff to themselves, but can they
to anything else?
--
On Bureaucracy....
The Pythagorean theorem contains 24 words. Archimedes
Principle, 67. The Ten Commandments, 179. The American Declaration of
Independence, 300. And recent legislation in Europe concerning when
and where to smoke, 23,942. -- The European, June 23-29, 1995
There's stuff above here
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