Re: Web editing with mc

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hi, David!

> I use MC as the main tool in the maintenance of our web site. There are
> some changes I would propose. I know they can be done by users
> themselves in their user directories, but I think that most of them
> could do as defaults.
> 
> Let's go:
> 
> 1) The HTML syntax file may be better but it's quite useful. It's been
> written with uppercase tags and it can be converted to lowercase as
> stated at the head of the file. HTML is case insensitive, but new XHTML
> requires lowercase tags. I would convert the file to show lowercase tags
> (I do it everyday for myself when installing the latest snapshot) and
> let the user change it to uppercase if preferred.

It's currently the largest syntax file by a wide margin.  I don't think MC
should distinguish valid and invalid tags - there are too many of them,
not to mention the attributes.  There are validators that do their job.  
MC is not an HTML validator. In particular, uppercase tags are perfectly
OK in HTML 3.2.

I believe that mc should highlight only syntax, not names, unless the
later are some very common keywords.  I think the whole html.syntax should
be rewritten and simplified.  By the way, maybe we should hightlight "<"  
and ">" with a separate color in the opening and closing tags
respectively?

> It would be nice to have this as a standard filter in the editor
> (edit.indent.rc), sort of:
> 
>     htm|html|HTM|HTML)
>     # http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
>         tidy -m -ascii -wrap 80 -f "tidy-$1.log" "$2"
>     ;;

Maybe.

> Standard error is sent to a log file as it may give some useful
> information on the changes done. That's the best choice I got yesterday.
> 
> 3) About edit.indent.rc. It seems that if any error message is received
> changes are ignored and the message goes to the editing block. Wouldn't
> it be better to keep the warning/error in the console before the "Press
> key" message and maybe have a flag to be used as the error value of the
> script and to tell mcedit if the buffer ($2) can be used?

Maybe it would be better, but the number of dirty hacks in mc is
absolutely incredible, and the number of people fixing them is very small.  
I have to choose what to fix first.

> 4) Viewers: What about trying "links" before "lynx"?

Rearranging associations for html files is one of my high priority tasks 
before the release.  Yes, links will be first if DISPLAY is unset, unless 
I find any problems with it.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin