Documentation Mailing Lists FAQ Roadmap - Questionaire Responses for AA CAMP 2004

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1. Main problems and annoyances you encounter when using ActionApps
Plain text/HTML input types and text formatting.

I find that users often want to input texts that have a minimal need for formatting, for example, a text that contains a few words in itallics for emphasis but that requires no other text formatting.

In the current scheme, the text either has to be pure plain text or else completely formatted in HTML. I often find that neither option is ideal. Plain text rules out any formatting at all. However, using HTML means that then all line breaks and paragraphs have to be marked up appropriately. This requires a knowlege of HTML on the part of the author or at least the ability to create the proper code in DreamWeaver or another HTML generation tool. This defeats the purpose of ease of use that is one of the selling points of AA, and also can cause problems with css formatting applied in the code of the view.

Another option would be to use the Rich Text Area, but the current implementation seems to only work with certain browsers and the code is not very clean, once again interfering with formatting applied with css in the views.

2. Features suggested for future development versions of ActionApps
I think that the ideal would be some sort of very simple Rich Text-like environment, that would allow an author to paste in plain text and then add simple formattings such as bold, itallics, underline, etc. with a toolbar. I am not sure that such a tool exists, as most such tools seem to try to imitate all of the functions of MS Word formatting or the Hotmail formatting toolbar.

I think that a simple solution would be best, because overall text formatting should ideally be controlled by the view, but there are some things that have to be applied according to content as I mentioned above. In general, I think that there needs to be a few adjustments made to the model of text input in order to make sure that the HTML generated from plain text input is compatible with common ways of controlling formatting within views using style sheets.

3. Comments About Usablility

4. General future development suggestions

Submited by:
Ian Macdonald

Jun 3 2025

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