[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML Editors - Word 2000??
On the subject of XML editors: * FrameMaker+SGML is excellent, but a big job to set up for complete structured editing. * EditTime is a very fast editor that is pretty simple to set up, aimed at programmers. * I have not tried Epic, but Adept editor has nice data entry. >Paul Prescod <paul@p...> writes: >> No one advocates pretending that structure doesn't exist. Not to be contrarian, but I would love an XML editor that hid structure from me. Just like a coloured map, it would be great if all inline elements were associated with a font or style, and that I could use the style menus to drill down to the allowed generic elements in context. For some people, I think visual operation is stronger than conceptual operation; for markup languages it means that even though I may start editing a document using thoughts about the structure, when I become familiar with the editor I may be better switching over to using visual cues (and to using keyboard rhythms). My final goal may be "insert a particular element", but my proximate goal shortcuts itself to "insert something that looks the same as other instances of that element". Anyone who has used FrameMaker+SGML or some of the other structure-based editors knows that when a content model has many choice items, scrolling menus are tedious. Furthermore, it is difficult to keep track of many choices mentally anyway. So I think a good user interface for an editor would also allow specify elements by reverse tracing through the stylesheet: you know you want to insert an element that is rendered italic & bold by the current stylesheet, so you select menu Style>Italic>Bold> and it would present you a choice of any element types in the current context whose stylesheet matches that description. I wonder if this would involve less mental effort on entry-operators especially when there are content models with many choices: it reduces the number of names they have to recognise in order to make the desired choice, potentially to a single choice. Presumably the same HCI rule (maximum of seven choices at any level) that operates on names would also operated on styles, so there would also be a maximum of 7 style qualities at any level that the operator would have to look through. On a similar vein, one good thing that having named content models in XML Schemas is that they can allow hierarchical menus for selecting elements. Rick Jelliffe xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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