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RE: XML-appropriate editing data structures

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: XML-appropriate editing data structures
• From: Micah Dubinko <MDubinko@v...>
• Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 15:24:55 -0700

+1 (on jEdit awesomeness, and the uselessness of outline view for markup)

-----Original Message-----
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...]
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 2:06 AM
To: Bob Foster
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  XML-appropriate editing data structures


At 9:08 PM -0500 4/7/04, Bob Foster wrote:

>However, the expectations of a modern XML editor are set by the 
>features of modern programming language editors:

As someone who wrote a 1200 page book, completely in XML in the very 
high-performing jEdit, and another 300 page book in the XML editor 
known as OpenOffice, I have to question a lot of your assumptions 
about what features a modern XML editor should have. For instance, I 
find outline view completely useless. It seems to get into editors 
only because modern GUI toolkits make it trivial to implement (at 
least until documents stop being small), not because users actually 
want to edit their documents as outlines.

I think an editor that began by asking how users actually want to 
edit XML data would avoid a lot of the performance problems you've 
encountered, simply by not implementing unnecessary features. I see 
no reason that the feature set of an XML editor should be a copy of 
the feature set of a modern programming language editor. I want very 
different things when I'm editing XML than when I'm writing code. 
They are not the same task. They are not even close.

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

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