[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Editing XML with XPath and friends
I've been spending some time looking at XMLWidgets [1], a way of rendering XML documents available for Zope [2]. What XMLWidgets does is basically run a bit of script to create an HTML representation when a particular element is matched. More than one script may match an element: it is up to that script to say whether or not it should run (ie. is my parent "sect1"? OK, then I'm the "title" you're looking for). In fact the "scripts" I mention are really objects, which have a method for rendering a DOM node and one returning a boolean value when queried to see if the render method should be activated for the node in question. This is quite a neat way of creating an interface. Elements can then have intelligent programmatic objects assigned to them to take care of their rendering. XMLWidgets takes it one step further: because we have a DOM we can also edit the node in question. Part of the example code shows a very simple HTML & forms editing interface for XML. So objects that "know" how to render and edit an element's contents can be collected together to create a composite editing interface. In various unfinished conversations with Peter Murray-Rust I've discussed editor functionality like this. While XMLWidgets is obviously specific to the Zope platform, I wonder whether this approach could be used elsewhere. A "bundle" could contain XPaths, so the controlling editor knows when to activate a particular object, as well as rendering and behavioral code (let's say the rendering could be done with XHTML, or perhaps XUL, and behavior programmed with JavaScript). With such a framework quite complex editing widgets could be evolved for datatypes and document fragments and collected together into an editing interface. I'm sure that some of this must have been done before, and I'd love to be directed to it if it has. What I think would be fun, and I believe incredibly beneficial to the cause of editing on the Web, was if an open API could be evolved to support such a framework. The idea would be to make it as open as possible, with a minimum desirable requirement that it could be implemented in the current generation of emerging browsers, using XHTML, ECMAScript, SVG (and perhaps XUL), and readily plugged into other applications that required editing functionality. That said, I don't see why alternatives for Swing, Tk etc. can't all be somehow offered. [Perhaps this is what XForms is all about, anyway? However I believe all this could be done with existing standards.] Pointers welcome. If anyone's done something like this then I think a wider audience should know about it! -- Edd references: [1] http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/XMLWidgets [2] http://www.zope.org/ *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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