> This implies either one of two things. First, that the Controller has to be specialized for the target widget. It's a TextController, with its own house key t

> This implies either one of two things. First, that the Controller has to be specialized for the target widget. It's a TextController, with its own house key to the TextView Yes, this appears to be the way it worked in Smalltalk-80 [1]. You had StringHolderView and StringHolderController which used a StringHolder as the model. > Or second, that the Controller doesn't do anything useful at all The controller in Smalltalk-80 controlled input focus. The view wouldn't be able to receive any input without a controller: "Class Controller does include default scheduling behavior. It takes the point of view that only one controller is to be active at a time; that is, only one controller at a time mediates user input actions. Other views could be displaying information in parallel, but the user's actions are to be interpreted by a single controller. Thus, there is behavior in class Controller for determining whether a controller needs to receive or maintain control." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100921030808/http://www.itu.dk/courses/VOP/E2005/VOP2005E/8_mvc_krasner_and_pope.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20100921030808/http://www.itu.dk...