Re: Attachability
Re: Attachability
- Subject: Re: Attachability
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 21:17:49 -0300
At 5:36 PM -0500 07/02/01, Peter Fine wrote:
We're drifting off into definitional Never-Never Land. "Attachable" is a
term which has been around and has been used in official Apple documents in
the manner Stephen Bryant is using it.
I'm not sure what documents you're looking at, but on page 25 of the
APPLESCRIPT LANGUAGE GUIDE is the following, which is pretty close to
what I quoted from Cal's own Scripter User Guide yesterday. Except
that they include menus here (though I'm not convinced that a menu
item is an application object - the don't show up in any object
models).
Finally, some scriptable applications are also attachable. An attachable
application is one that can be customized by attaching scripts to
specific objects
in the application, such as buttons and menu items.
I disagree with you, Bill Briggs.
That's Fine, Peter. (no pun intended, okay, a bit of one).
Scripts in a "Scripts" menu are attached
to that menu. The problem is that a relatively large number of apps are
attachable only to the extent of providing a Scripts menu.
Well, aside from whose memory space the script runs in, OSA Menu
makes every application attachable, or virtually attachable. You just
want to be able to launch the script while the application in
question is frontmost, and that service is available, even better, it
allows hotkey launching. I see no difference in the material effect
between that and a script menu in an application. So a script menu
really doesn't add anything of significance if a developer does add
it. The FrameMaker Scripts folder you can stuff full of aliases to
anything and select them from the menu and they open, aps, other
docs, whatever. So it's more of an "I'll open whatever you want" menu
than anything.
Menu business aside, FrameMaker, the application with which I spend
most of my life, is in fact attachable through its hypertext
facility. You can set up areas of text, images, buttons, whatever,
that will serve as a place to launch scripts. Using the "message
openfile <scriptname>" syntax associated with a hypertext marker that
you can insert in documents, you can launch scripts, or other things
for that matter. It's not limited to scripts. It's a more general and
widely applicable feature than that.
In "The
AppleScript Scorecard Guidelines, Cal and Bill Cheeseman limit "attachable"
to mean "has a Scripts menu" and use "embeddable" for all other aspects and
instances of attachment.
Like I said, Cal contradicts that in his own user guide, and he
specifically doesn't mention menus. Embeddable seems an unnecessary
term. For my money he made more sense in what he wrote in the User
Guide than what he wrote the other day on the list. YMMV.
What has gotten lost here is Stephen's request for information on how to use
the attachment facilities in those few applications that have them: Smile,
Style, Script Debugger 2, BBEdit 6 (that I know of).
Add Eudora (they appear under the special menu) and FrameMaker to
that list. I use FrameMaker constantly and don't even use its scripts
menu because of OSA Menu. OSA menu allows organization of all
application specific scripts in one place. Easier to maintain and
back up. And running the scripts in FrameMaker offers no particular
advantage.
He makes the point, valid in my opinion, that the documentation for those
apps (perhaps with the exception of BBEdit 6) is inadequate to enable even a
sophisticated scripter to figure out how to use these facilities.
Sure that's a valid point. The documentation about anything
scripting related is inadequate for most applications.
Cal says it's up to the developer to document his or her implementation.
Who would argue with that?
I don't know if Eudora has anything about their script menu support
in the documentation or not. I've never looked. But there is
something, albeit brief, in the FrameMaker documentation about
AppleScript and the use of the scripts menu.
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