[gdome]daydreaming

[Luca Padovani <padovani scl csd uwo ca>]

Hi folks.

Finally it seems like gdome2 is becoming more popular every day. This is
testified by the growing number of bindings available, and the effort of
many people (including Paolo).

So maybe it's time to start thinking at.... what gdome was born for. Now we
can navigate XML documents, we can attach events to nodes, by means of a
standard API. We can load, parse and save documents. It's time to start
thinking at what we want to do with such documents. I guess most of gdome2
users are not just content to navigate the tree structure and print a few
things here and there.
The first thing one usually think at is... rendering. There are many markups
out there waiting to be rendered. But, more important, many of them allow
embedding, so that, for example, I can have a XHTML document with SVG
and MathML markup embedded. Now, I know that many project are currently alive,
we have renderers for SVG (at least a partial implementation), HTML, MathML.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to combine all these tool together in a
modular way? I guess bonobo can play an important role here. You say, yeah,
great, but we have mozilla already. Wait a second, I don't want to buy a
1 gig processor with 256 megs memory just to run a browser decently. And
what about extensibiliy in mozilla? Is it possible to attach my event handlers
to an XML document? Can I share my XML document with other applications
doing the editing? Is mozilla component oriented? Is it feasible to use mozilla
as the help browser in my system?

And, anyway, rendering is not the whole story. We want to compile, profile,
annotate programs and documents encoded in XML. We want to do much more
things with them.

What I'm trying to say is that gdome2 can be an important abstraction layer
enabling applications and, yes, *components*, to talk each other about a
common structure. It's really a pity that everybody with a rendering engine
for a given markup language is just living in his own CVS module, not caring
about others.

I have many many ideas in my mind, and I cannot think about everything because
I'm pretty busy with my work right now, but I'd be really glad to see some
discussion here about this stuff, and to make gdome2 even more successful,
possibily where others failed.

If you believe you can give ideas, time, code... it's time to discuss
about all this, and maybe set up a common project, a common component
oriented interface, a common way of thinking at applications, and start
coding them.

All the best

	luca