Forum OpenACS Development: Curious about htmlarea widget and text-or-html dropdown -- is it still there?

Hi. In the new (oacs-5.2 & +) ad_form html_area, I notice that the dropdown for the type (plain text, html, something else) is gone... does this mean that this widget is -always- supposed to return html as its value?

So if you ever did want to bring it back, you'd scan the string for tag-looking things and change them so they're not, put
where the newlines are, etc etc?

i suppose, you mean: in which situations does the format menu show up, when ad_form encounters a richtext widget (e.g. one passes a widget spec like the following to ad_form text:richtext(richtext),nospell,optional ...).

When a rich text editor is enabled (rte or xinha) and the client has java script enabled, a rich text widget returns always HTML, therefore the format menu does not make sense and is not dsplayed. Even worse, the format menu can cause inconsitencies, when the user says: its plaintext, but the rich text editor returns always html, where in other situations (e.g. no javascript enabled) the flag says the truth.

The rich text editor is enabled either globally for a site (kernel parameter UseHtmlAreaForRichtextP) or per widget (property htmlarea_p in the widget spec).

so, if i understand correctly, you have the rich text widget enabled, but you do not want it in certain situations. Here you can set htmlarea_p to 0 in the widget spec.