Re: early plans to an XML Editor -- questions

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, May 22, 2001 at 04:41:10PM +0200, Wilbert Berendsen wrote:
> Hi, all, I'me new here and have just some ideas and questions.
> 
> I would like to start a project to write an XML editor (I have a name
> already, but no single line of code yet and not much experience) but
> I would like to get some feedback. First I'll try to outline what I
> think of:
> 
> * opens file with or without dtds
> * edit any sort of xml file
> * fast (simple gui)
> * use dtd or Xschema to help easy creation of new valid documents
> * use xsl to transform documents (to (x)html or latex or csv or
>   whatever)
> * use xsl to combine documents (like writing a letter to multiple
>   recipients, or constructing a website from xsl templates)
> * editing in different modes:
>   * tree view / no-nonsense plain-text view.
>   * a LyX-like (WYSIWYM) screen view. (my xml editor will be
>     primarily intended to construct structured web
>     documents/books(docbook) etc.) This view should also be helpful
>     to enter structured data like addressbook lists, etc. The Widget
>     could use CSS to have a basic useful layout.

  a word of warning: this is ambitious, it will take some time
  a word of praise: excellent idea, we need tools for our docbook
doc authors and we have a large part of the infrastructure already I think.

> My questions:
> 
> * is there a gtk/gnome widget that I could use to render XML using (a
>   subset  of) CSS (primarily 'display:' property and some
>   font-size/font-family thinghies) so that the user can edit
>   documents in a WYSIWYM way?
>   Maybe I must use Mozilla (no experience in that) but I would like
>   to  have something lighter and simpler)? Abiword's widget??

  I strongly suggest you look a gtkhtml2, it's based on libxml2
and I think reuses the tree and provide  CSS support at least for HTML.
  Of course I suggest you base this on libxml2 (and possibly use libxslt)
but I'm strongly biased.

> * Are there already any efforts towards a XML editor/document
>   processor? (Not that I found, besides the number of projects that
>   use xml)

  Gtkhtml2, I think there is another one (can't remember the name),

> * would this be a nice, useful tool or could I better put some energy
>   in helping exsisting projects akin this one.

  This is definitely something missing and useful !

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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