February 22, 2004

"The more they overthink the plumbing..."

My Internet service got cut off again (this time, likely to be permanent -- thanks boss). But that's not this entry.

I spent about two weeks in my spare time hammering together a nice, working XUL widget to interactively modify the DOM of a MathML+generic XML fragment. I bumped into a large number of problems, including some fun with XUL trees.

Yesterday, I had the bright idea that maybe I should show the user the content as a string of XML code in a textarea. Of course, if they can see it, they should be able to edit it directly, right?

After less than ten minutes working with the textarea, it occured to me that the textarea was so much easier to use than the XUL widget I had so painstakingly developed. I guess I'm glad that code didn't go anywhere but in my blog.

Posted by WeirdAl at February 22, 2004 3:14 PM
Comments

And I trust you're properly escaping that XML, so I won't have someone filing a compat parser bug on this two months down the road? ;-)

Posted by: Chris Hoess at February 23, 2004 11:28 PM

Don't need to. I'm using the value property of the multiline textbox to set the contents. :)

I do know how to use <![CDATA[...]]> though.

Posted by: Alex Vincent at February 24, 2004 10:17 AM