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Apple's terminology anarchy
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Apple's terminology anarchy


  • Subject: Apple's terminology anarchy
  • From: John Delacour <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 17:28:41 +0100
  • Mac-eudora-version: 6.0a29

Once upon a time there was some sort of predictability about application dictionaries. Something like this could be expected to work in a whole range of applications.

tell application "Tex-Edit Plus"
text of window 1
text of document 1
end tell

In Cocoa apps, we can no longer get the old properties of 'window' and are obliged always to talk of a 'document' even if the thing is an unsaved window.

In TextEdit I must ask for the 'content' of the document and this will not work in Script Editor, where I must ask for the 'text' of the document or the 'contentS' of the document, which seem to be identical. Mail, of course, has 'document' in its dictionary but doesn't know what a document is, so if we pretend that 'message' is a document, then we might expect to be able to get the 'text' or the 'contents' of the message, but again we have to ask for the 'content'.

I see that Nisus Writer Express has 'text' of document and also 'selected text', which would be 'selection' in Script Editor and most of the carbon apps and nothing at all in the other cocoa apps.

From what I've seen Script Editor is the only cocoa app that is even beginning to look scriptable, but even here there are shortcomings. The others are hopelessly deficient, with one exception of course -- Mail is just plain loony.

Where are the guidelines for writers of dictionaries?

JD


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