[Xsltforms-support] injecting XML element(s) at cursor position in text area?

[C. M. Sperberg-M. <cm...@bl...>]

When displaying nodes in input widgets or text widgets, is there
a way to insert an XML element at the user's current cursor
position, if they press a button?  

What I have in mind is similar to the buttons labeled 'ul', 'ol',
'li', 'b' in some in-browser HTML editors, which insert the indicated
tag into a text box at the user's current cursor position in that box.

I am not at the moment trying to allow the user to edit mixed
content (so I don't think TinyMCE is what I want); what I want
is to display an element which needs to be split in two and allow 
the user to tell me where to split it.  

For example, I might have a program that guesses where sentence 
boundaries occur in a text, and want to build an XForm to allow 
a user to correct the sentence tagging.  

The automatic sentence tagger can make two kinds of mistakes:

1) False positive:  It can place a sentence boundary where it 
shouldn't.  

So in front of every sentence element except the first in a paragraph, 
I'll want a button saying "merge", meaning "merge this sentence 
element with the preceding sentence element", to correct this 
error.

2) False negative:  it can fail to place a sentence boundary where
it should.

So I'd like to be able to allow the user to click within a single
sentence element to place the cursor, then click a button which
means "split this sentence element here."  Ideally, I don't want 
them to be able to change the text, only to indicate a place and
say "split here."

As another example:  if my project is marking boundaries between
the morphemes in a word, I want to handle transcription of the
document in one step, and in a second step ask the users to 
segment each word into morphemes.   The same two operations are
needed:  split this element here, and (to undo mistakes) join these
two elements.  

I am willing to accept the insertion of an empty element meaning
'segment-boundary-here' as a substitute for splitting the element,
because I can always use XSLT to detect the empty boundary elements
and perform the splits.  

Is there any way to do this with XForms (and more specifically with
XSLTForms)?  If I can't find a way to do this, I suppose I'll end up
either (a) giving the user an input widget and saying "insert a *
at each morpheme boundary", and rejecting input in which anything
has changed other than insertion of *, or (b) displaying the word 
o n e   l e t t e r   a t   a   t i m e, with buttons between them saying
"split here".  (But doing a whole sentence at a time with that interface
would be very awkward.)

Thanks for any help anyone here can provide.


-- 
****************************************************************
* C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC
* http://www.blackmesatech.com 
* http://cmsmcq.com/mib                 
* http://balisage.net
****************************************************************