Should dropdown items work as 2–state or simple apply?

[oleq]

ATM the drop-down items work like 2–state buttons, i.e. bold:

despite the "Paragraph" item, which reverts block to default <p>.

However, as @mlewand pointed out, MS Word and Google Docs implement such items as 1–state (1–way) buttons. They apply the block/format/style/font and never revert it when used multiple times.

It turned out in a F2F talk with @mlewand that users actually got used to this 1–way approach. They often have mixed styling in the content and they select a huge chunk of text and use a dropdown (like the heading) to make sure the styling is exactly what they need. ATM, they need to use the heading drop–down twice to do this (first click to <p>, then another to select the block), which is pretty annoying, I guess.

I think we should be consistent with major desktop text processors and with v4 in this matter (it's a cross–version issue, actually). WDYT? (cc @Reinmar, @fredck).

Maybe we should also start a discussion in http://ckeditor.github.io/editor-recommendations/?

[Reinmar]

I have no strong opinion about this. Especially when talking about the heading dropdown because it's very different from how font size, family, color or other styles are used. It will be extremely uncommon for people to try to select 10 lines of text which may contain headings already and apply some heading to all that.

It's a significantly different story with styling options. In this case you may have selection like this:

<p>foo<span color=red>bar[bom</span>boo]</p>

And you may want to apply the red color to all that. The toggle behaviour which CKEditor 4 implements at the moment will remove the color from "bom" which is the opposite of what the user would wants to do.

I guess there would be no harm if the heading dropdown worked like this as well, but I'm not sure if there's any harm from how it works like now.

[mlewand]

I agree on case of spans. Talking about paragraphs/headings, as long as options are mutually exclusive, the behavior should be common in both cases.

Important question here is how we want to keep the possibility to remove given change. I think that one way would be to add "Default" (or similar sounding) option as a first one.

[fredck]

I find the current behavior wrong for a select box. It is definitely not a toggle button.

[fredck]

Maybe we should also start a discussion in http://ckeditor.github.io/editor-recommendations/?

ER is not about that. This is a pure UI issue.

[Reinmar]

I find the current behavior wrong for a select box. It is definitely not a toggle button.

Good point.

Take a look at select boxes in GH's issue page. You have the multi-option ones like "Assignees" where you have toggle options (click your name twice and it will add and then remove you). But if you have single-option select boxes (like "Milestone"), then clicking an active option will not remove it.

I think it's a good rule.

[fredck]

True... it reflects the behavior of single vs multi option selection boxes in HTML.

[mlewand]

What about restoring default value? GH automatically puts a distinguishable "Clear xyz" option at the beginning.

Typical Word processor doesn't need such option because it always holds full content. For our editor the case is different, as we often time are authoring part of the content, which might (and should) inherit formatting dictated by the layout.

[oleq]

Yeah, that's a good point @mlewand. We must allow users restore the default styling/heading/whatever because the content is often styled by web page CSS.

Maybe it's not that visible in heading feature because we already offer the "Paragraph" button in the dropdown but what about other features? I'm mostly talking in the context of v4 which produces lots of styling but maybe we'll face the same problem in the future in v5 as well?

[Reinmar]

Maybe it's not that visible in heading feature because we already offer the "Paragraph" button in the dropdown but what about other features? I'm mostly talking in the context of v4 which produces lots of styling but maybe we'll face the same problem in the future in v5 as well?

I think we'll need to decide per case. Here we have "Paragraph" and in other cases we'll have "Clear" or "Reset" or "Default".