Inline Edit: Single line/multi-line?

[Daphne Ogle]

This is a difficult question and I'm having difficulty defining the  
distinction between "simple text" and "large amounts" of text.  I've  
been thinking of the latter as something more like a document where  
the user may be making multiple edits in one "field" and they likely  
will use something like a wysiwyg editor to do the editing.  The  
storyboard for this can be found at:  http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Inline+Edit+Storyboard+-+Edit+large+amounts+of+text

I think the simple text editor should support both single line a  
multiple line text depending of the context it's being used in.  So  
both a text field and a text box would fall into the "simple text" area.

Basically for simple text, the user is editing a single component.   
The edits are changed when the user moves focus away from the field.   
And we add a temporary undo to allow them them go back to the state  
before they started editing.  For the "large amounts" of text (or  
perhaps better called 'document-style editing) there can be any number  
of lines of text like in a wiki page.  Many edits can be made in  
different sections of the "document" without the focus ever changing  
so a one time undo isn't enough protection for the user.  We use an  
explicit save in this case to make sure they really want to save all  
their changes.  They also likely create this text with some sort of  
wysiwyg editor.

Just today I started thinking of these 2 interactions as 2 different  
components that are part of a family of inline edit components.   I  
could be way off base and haven't even had a sanity check on this  
thinking.

-Daphne

On Jul 10, 2008, at 1:59 PM, Anastasia Cheetham wrote:

>
> Hey, folks,
>
> The Inline Edit functional requirements distinguish between editing
> simple text and editing large amounts of text. Technically we've been
> interpreting this distinction to be single-line vs. multi-line. So
> far, we've only implemented single-line editing.
>
> Is this a reasonable interpretation? Or should the notion of 'simple
> text' include support for multiple lines of text? If someone pastes
> text that includes a carriage return into a simple inline edit, should
> it resize to be multiple lines?
>
> -- 
> Anastasia Cheetham                   a.cheetham at utoronto.ca
> Software Designer, Fluid Project    http://fluidproject.org
> Adaptive Technology Resource Centre / University of Toronto
>
> _______________________________________________
> fluid-work mailing list
> fluid-work at fluidproject.org
> http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work

Daphne Ogle
Senior Interaction Designer
University of California, Berkeley
Educational Technology Services
daphne at media.berkeley.edu
cell (510)847-0308