Totally broken notes and saving in current git

Robert Helling helling at atdotde.de
Sun Jul 20 01:10:19 PDT 2014


On 20 Jul 2014, at 08:49, Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:

Good morning!

> I have no idea where this insanity started, but this is seriously
> useless and complete crap.

I think I can help with that question. When I redid the “planned dive to notes” to make it include a runtime table I thought about the “table” part of that. In my first version, I had an ascii table which of course looked “complete crap” when presented in a proportional font. Then I tried to figure out how to enforce a fixed width font and realised that this (in Qt’s way) would be done by applying a style sheet which would make the notes effectively html. But with that, I thought, we can actually use an html table for the table, which it is now. Then somebody took off from there and added red color and boldface to the notes generated by the planner. So that the notes are now html.

Then somebody complained that after saving and reloading their notes displayed html source. And iirc that prompted Tomaz to write the code that you are worried about right now.

I think, what is needed here is an executive decision on what the notes are:

1) plain text (i.e. no color, boldface and table generated by the planner). I must say even though I see the purity argument for that I don’t like this option very much. And we somehow gave up on this when we gave up 7bit ASCII in favour of unicode.

2) html (as partly generated by Qt) which is the current situation which has the main disadvantage that it looks “complete crap” as soon as you open the .xml or the git file in an editor but is opaque to the user. 

3) have some mild form of mark up/rich text (for table, boldface, color) but only store that part that is absolutely necessary. We could implement that with some intermediate representation (we could store a mildly marked up version of the notes and only display the proper html, so have a different internal representation than what we display, as we do with units etc) or we could get rid of all unnecessary html tags when storing (possibly with xslt). This option of course would need more coding. A mild version would be to memorise if notes are pure ascii (as entered by the user) or proper html (as generated by the planner) and store and display accordingly.

Unfortunately, we can not go with 2) for the moment and hope to move to 1) or 3) later as then all users files would be “poisoned” by the html-garbledigog that we have now.

Best
Robert
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 495 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.hohndel.org/pipermail/subsurface/attachments/20140720/dabc276b/attachment.sig>


More information about the subsurface mailing list