Inline Edit: Single line/multi-line?

[Colin Clark]

Hey guys,

I'm joining this thread late, but have been enjoying following the  
insightful discussion. Here are my thoughts regarding the technical  
implementation of the different "flavours" of inline editing.

On 16-Jul-08, at 9:33 AM, Anastasia Cheetham wrote:
>
> On 15-Jul-08, at 1:51 PM, Antranig Basman wrote:
>
>> I am wondering whether we should not proceed more DOM-agnostically
>> about this....
>> ... we would expect the component user to
>> simply write the markup they require...

Yes, DOM agnosticism is a primary strategy for us to ensure that Fluid  
components are really easily customized and changed. At its heart, the  
Inline Edit code need to be prepared to handle different types of  
markup and content. I thoroughly agree that it should be possible for  
the implementor of our component to simply provide a different type of  
edit field in the markup--a text area instead of a text field--and the  
component should adapt accordingly.

> However, one of the goals of the Inline Edit is to greatly simplify
> the process of making something editable. We'd like to be able to
> "take care of it for you," that is, allow users to point the component
> to any piece of text and say "Please make this editable, I don't
> really care how you do it, so long as it's <yadda yadda>."


Anastasia is also correct here. InlineEdit need to also have the  
ability to provide sensible defaults for the primary use cases we're  
considering here. In other words, it should, in the absence of  
additional markup, be able to self-render different types of edit  
fields based on the scenarios defined by Daphne. The convention we've  
settled on in Fluid is a set of "creator" functions that return a  
correctly configured InlineEdit instance.

So, the goal here is to provide the implementor with both markup  
customizability and good defaults, all wrapped in a useful  
programmatic API.

Colin

---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org