Navel Gazing

Seriously, are we so short of worthwhile things to write about that this sort of nitpicking is interesting to some people? Maybe it's just me, but whether or not the space next to my selection gets included in the copy/paste output does not rise to the level of a 1500 word essay, unless you've just quit your day job and have nothing better to whine about today.

My view: the behavior that Gruber (whom I respect enormously, and who is a much, much better writer than I) is bleating about is completely consistent with text editing of Roman languages in general. He's apparently annoyed that NSTextView doesn't understand that he was pasting into an HTML context. Well, he was using MarsEdit, so I suppose that's a reasonable complaint, but he should direct his complaint at that application, and not at Apple's framework engineers. Apple's frameworks do a lot of things tailored for the general case. If you're writing an app that edits source code, you might want to override particular behaviors. I'll bet that MarsEdit engineers never gave any thought to smart "C/C/P" behavior and just used what they got for free (free!) from Apple. Their mistake, but TextEdit and other human-language editing apps benefit from this sort of behavior, and it's just dumb to suggest that the needs of a special-purpose app like MarsEdit trumps the more common case.