Crunchy dogfood, scratching itches

It’s certainly nothing I’d release (just yet, if ever), but I still wanted to brag about eating my own dogfood, posting this from my XUL Movable Type posting form (after knocking down two four more bugs in the process).

No WYSIWYG editor, since the Mozilla version is only different than the IE version, not actually better. Inserting a bunch of <span style=””> tags with no semantic value in place of IE’s (perfectly valid) capitalized HTML doesn’t strike me as an actual gain.

It doesn’t actually open in the Sidebar, since the standard javascript:stuff=other.stuff;void(window.open(...)) bookmarklet code doesn’t currently work with Sidebars, and none of the other ideas I’ve had work either, short of turning it into an installed extension, at which point you might just as well fork Mozblog and turn it into a MetaWeblog API plus extension-aware client (todo, in my idle hours).

But it does have really cute hiding and replacing each other fields for the entry, extended entry, and excerpt, and buttons for inserting links, strong, em, blockquote, and acronym (which I decided I wanted while starting this entry, and added in about a minute of copy-and-paste). And it fills the screen in a flexible, comfortable to write in way, which the old HTML popup opened in a tab instead never did. And next time I get a few spare minutes, the background on the excerpt field label will be bright red until I type a character in the excerpt, to keep me from forgetting to enter one, and once I look up what seems like the best idea for marking up code fragments (I never remember whether I use <code><pre> or <pre><code> or something else), I’ll add a button for that, too, because what took me from fiddling around with it, running into one brick wall after another, not being at all satisfied with where it was going, to just banging it out and having it working, was the realization that I could just scratch my own itches, without having to write code that’s cleaner than I know how to write, and without having to do things that I don’t want just because someone else does. If you really want it, you can have it: bm_entry.tmpl and bm_posted.tmpl and a little patch to CMS.pm at line 217 in my much-patched copy, all in the normal places in my obviously-named MT directory, but just this once, just for now, I think it’ll be something that I’m doing for me.

1 Comment

Comment by James #
2003-08-12 03:24:56

You want to execute something like:
embedded_document.execCommand(’useCSS’, false, true);

This will get mozilla to use <b> tags for bold instead of <span>’s, etc.

 
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