Your article on the DHTML editor was fascinating but were you
aware that this functionality has largely been subsumed into the browser as
of IE 5.5?
By simply marking any HTML component, such as a DIV (or even a SPAN)
with "contenteditable=true", you will find that it becomes editable. Standard
Word shortcuts such as ctrl-b, ctrl-i etc. allow you to bold and italicize
text.
By embedding the IE browser ActiveX control in an application, you can
then provide the user with an immensely rich UI as part of a larger application.
You create the HTML to render the page 'on the fly' inside a VB application,
for example, and then you simply insert this dynamically into the body of
the page being shown by the browser control.
It is true that you can also build these sorts of applications using
just JScript inside the browser, but debugging is much weaker than a hybrid
VB-browser solution, where the browser effectively provides the display
tier only.
Behaviors are useful in this regard because they allow you to then add
editing functionality within the browser canvas in a modular and object-oriented
way.
Consider, for example, the following page:
<html>
<body>
<div style=behavior:url("resize.h
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BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > August
