On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 05:23:53PM +0100, John Levon wrote: > On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 06:46:45PM +0300, Martin Vermeer wrote: > > > Not very convincing, is it? Most people learn from experience. What > > would happen here is that they would quickly pick up that -- no, this > > stuff does not behave like italicize; it behaves like insets instead. > > Familiar paradigm that too, though different. After that realization, > > everything becomes natural, and the above mistakes silly in retrospect. > > And soon the penny will drop on the many advantages. > > Could you list the advantages of an exposed inset UI? > > thanks > john
Sure. I will only list the usability advantages and leave implementation out. 1) You know precisely where a typed character goes -- or where an already typed character belongs. Inside or outside any given inset. A special case of this is for blanks, which don't display much in terms of rendering style. 2) The discipline of nesting is imposed corresponding to the logic of semantics. Meaning, in the semantic sense, typically forms a tree. Exceptions to that which I have seen are either more or less pathological, or esoteric. 3) No ambiguity about nesting order. 4) Because of 2) and 3), no problems with our favourite back-ends, LaTeX and XML. This would be the obligatory place to state "...but I'm sure there are a lot more...", but I won't do that. They are probably variants of the above. - Martin
