Inline Edit: Blanks -- initial, embedded, and trailing

[Daphne Ogle]

>>
>> Anastasia Cheetham wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 21-Jul-08, at 8:05 PM, Paul Zablosky wrote:
>>>
>>>> A couple of questions:
>>>>     • Is the trimming and compressing of blanks part of the  
>>>> intended behaviour of the component?
>>>
>>> The compression of blanks is a side effect of the way HTML works -  
>>> if you put a string of spaces into HTML markup, they are displayed  
>>> as a single space. If you want what is called a 'non-breaking  
>>> space,' you have to use the special character ' ' instead of  
>>> a regular space character.
>>>
>>> It's a question for the designers as to what would be the ideal  
>>> behaviour when a user enters a string of spaces into the edit field.
> In this case, without know the context, I think we have to take the  
> users actions as intentional.   Can people think of scenarios where  
> a user likely enters more spaces than they meant to?  We could make  
> this configurable.
>>>
> Eli and I were just discussing this since we had fairly different  
> answers to this question (he thought there were rarely times when  
> you wouldn't want to trim the spaces).  I keep thinking about Word  
> and that we hear quite often from users that they just want this  
> stuff to work like if they were working in Word.   Although to folks  
> who know HTML markup it seems silly to use spaces to adjust  
> presentation but this is how many non-markup folks are left to  
> deal.  If there are spaces in the middle of a text string I think we  
> need to assume the user is intentionally adding the extra spaces.   
> User intentions become unclear  if there is an extra space at the  
> beginning or end of their text because those are hard (or  
> impossible) to see.  And apparently extra spaces can be evil with  
> data normalization so minimizing those mistakes is important.  So,  
> my proposal is keep extra spaces mid text (like Paul's original  
> example) and trim extra spaces at the beginning and end.
>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
> Daphne Ogle
> Senior Interaction Designer
> University of California, Berkeley
> Educational Technology Services
> daphne at media.berkeley.edu
> cell (510)847-0308
>
>
>
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Daphne Ogle
Senior Interaction Designer
University of California, Berkeley
Educational Technology Services
daphne at media.berkeley.edu
cell (510)847-0308



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