[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] "View Structure"
Jumbo's ability to show *any* XML document based purely on its tree structure leads me to propose a convention among those who are developing XML browsers. All common Web broswers today have a "View Source" option that lets you look at the HTML source file. We all know how useful this is. Future XML browsers will presumably have a similar option. Because every well-formed XML document describes a tree, however, it's also possible to have a "View Structure" option that would give you a default navigable view of the document as a tree -- like the default Jumbo behavior. This view would allow you to expand and collapse the structure and it would show attribute nodes that could be opened to see the attributes on each element. It could use a file manager metaphor, like Jumbo, or it could use the plus-button/minus-button interface used for most dynamic browser TOCs, or it could use something else; the point is that it would be trivially autogenerated on request, show the document in XML terms, and provide a commonly understood base view independent of the application interface supplied for a given document type that would always be available to people trying to understand or debug an XML document. "View Structure" would presumably *not* use different type sizes, etc., but concentrate instead on exposing the guts of the document, so I would expect the display generated by character-mode browsers to look roughly the same as the display generated by the fancy graphics-mode browsers. This would just be an informal convention, like the inclusion of "View Source," but I think that it would be an extremely useful one. Jon xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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