View Source question

[Morgan Collett]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 8:47 PM, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe the only two reasons that view source isn't yet what we all
> hope it to be is a) because, when we got down to it, it became a
> little difficult to specify exactly what that hope is, and b) because
> there are so many other items on the plates of developers that the
> last thing worth dedicating time to then was an unsatisfactorily
> specified new feature.
>
> I don't think anyone disagrees with the desire to "pull back the
> covers" though, and I also think that doing so can certainly have some
> practical applications.  As Walter mentioned, in Browse their may be
> options for viewing the HTML source, the CSS and JS is applicable, and
> ultimately the bundle code of the activity.  This latter piece can be
> made standard, and simply hasn't been yet because the means of
> accomplishing this is the Develop activity, which is still in
> development and testing.
>
> To throw my thoughts on the table, I'd vote for the view source key to
> reveal a modal alert which contains the various options for "what to
> dig into" in some form, one of which would always be the bundle
> itself.  Through some API the activity could indicate what it can
> offer, and perhaps also indicate whether or not it intends to handle
> the request itself (that is, the Browse activity may wish to reveal
> the HTML source itself).  This all clearly needs some more thought,
> though.  Do others have refinements to the notion of this dialog,
> regarding how an activity can offer up some goodies for peeking at
> and/or how we can handle revealing those goodies through itself or
> other activities? At least this approach will give a consistent
> jumping off (or in, so to speak) point for the view source key,
> regardless of what other interfaces or activities are then revealed
> once an option is selected, and it provides a default behavior which
> will work for every activity without explicit activity participation.

I think one of the difficulties is maintaining some sort of context
for progressive View Source operations. For example, View Source on a
web page shows the page source in Write. View Source again should
ideally dive into the Browse source, not the Write source...

Morgan