ChrisAn ponders:
RichTextBox brings up an interesting question. Given the rich editing expierence for the RichTextBox, how could you provide a virtualized store? Perhaps a "ITextProvider" interface that could allow reading RTF from some user store? To make this even trickier, lets imagine the virtual store model for an HTML editor... Trident (sorry, codename for MSHTML which is the system component that does all the HTML rendering, parsing, etc, in Internet Explorer) handles the data and display - using the HTML elements as the model. This is needed for a rich editing experience. How could Trident provide the rich editing expierence with a virtualized store? - unless you virtualize just on the HTML text (with that same "ITextProvider" model)...
Chris is pondering a problem the Swing developers attempted to tackle several years ago, with arguable success. Swing's generic JEditorPane is a similar editor/renderer to Trident, but it is supposed to work for any structured document. It uses Swing's Document and StyledDocument abstractions as models. An abstract, per-content-type toolkit is used for rendering and editing the abstract document. Out of the box, J2SE has toolkits for HTML (3.2? 4.0?), RTFand of course plain text. Creating a new toolkit is heavy lifting, but because of the consistency in the Swing editor API it is merely busy-work, and doesn't require preternatural cleverness.
I don't know if a better abstraction than Swing's Document exists for the editor/renderer problem domain. Any other links appreciated.
11:45:08 AM 
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