emulating an input element. How?

[Stéphane Payrard]

My previous post was about a very early stage of an experiment.

And I thank Evan and Rehn for putting me back on the right track.

I want to emulate an input element by using  regular div elements

handling events. The tricky part will be positionning a cursor. This

should be done by positionning an opaque div that will act as the cursor on

top of the div containing the string .

To do so, I need to know where by somehow finding the bounding box

of the div containing the string. I think I could to that with jquery (a bold claim!)

and seeing atom code, I see something similar.

but I have no clue how to that in elm.

Am I again missing the obvious?

I can state that in more general terms, I want to create a DOM tree with one node depending

on other(s). or may be one DOM subtree depending on another.

Help!

[Rehno Lindeque]

I can state that in more general terms, I want to create a DOM tree with one node depending

on other(s). or may be one DOM subtree depending on another.

I'll give a quick hint if I may: You should always separate presentation from your data model. The positioning of the container and the cursor should probably be explicit in your data model. Admittedly I'm making this sound a bit easier than it is - you'd probably also need to use a monospaced font, beware of text wrapping and calculate the dimensions of the container yourself... no small task!

PS Implementing canvas-based text rendering in Elm might be a good project for someone and has the nice capability to measure text. (I think it should be faster too, I've run into performance issues with manually positioning lots of text elements in Elm)