Re: [gnome-love] Looking for ways to get involved

[Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

On Friday 18 October 2002 14:56, Agon S. Buchholz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for ways to get involved into the Gnome project; there are
> two areas I'm mainly interested in (but couldn't find any fitting Gnome
> app yet); maybe you can point me to projects I might have overlooked
> since I don't want to duplicate someone's work.
>
> The following areas are, as far as I know, currently neither covered by
> working Gnome apps nor by projects in early development state:
>
> (1) Logical-/ structural-based (*not* layout-based) WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM HTML
> editor (or maybe a GUI-based, visual SGML-/ XML-editor with HTML editing
> as a subset), Site and Link management etc.
>
> The closest matches of the current Gnome projects seem to bee Screem and
> maybe Bluefish (as I understand, this is primarily a GTK app), but
> neither of them are are having intentions to add more advanced visual
> interfaces to their editing environments.

Have you had a look at Conglomerate?  This sounds like exactly what you 
describe.  The web site (www.conglomerate.org) is very out of date, but I've 
recently ported the CVS version to GNOME 2.  It's intended as a user-friendly 
structured editor (DocBook XML support is a core goal, but in theory it can 
support any DTD).  It's free software (as in GPL), and uses some of the 
recent GNOME technologies (GnomeVFS, Bonobo etc) where appropriate.

> This application would be targeted to the numerous users of FrontPage,
> Dreamweaver and Go Live or maybe FrameMaker+SGML. It also could provide
> a more comfortable interface for editing DocBook documents.

That's the plan.

> It is often being argued that WYSIWYG HTML editors produce bad HTML
> markup and thus the HTML souce code editing should be preferred; I
> strongly object since tools like HTML tidy are availabe for a long time,
> and a smart apllication should be able to render perfeclty standard
> compliant HTML -- it's possible even with FrontPage, left besides tools
> like LyX (for TeX syntax) and FrameMaker+SGML (for SGML DTDs), so why
> shouldn't it be possible with HTML and an GPL'd visual WYSIWYG/ WYSIWYM
> editor?

etc

> (2) A mainly Logical-/ structural-based WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM document editor/
> document processing app in the kind of LyX, but with a real GUI. since
> even Klyx for the KDE is dead, there are (to my current knowledge)
> currently no plans to build visal interfaces to TeX/LaTeX in the works.
>
> This application would be targeted to users of Frame Maker or Ventura
> Publisher which don't want to edit code (like in environments
> facilitating pure LaTeX2e or GNU Emacs in SGML mode) but have to work on
> complex documents.

The plan of Conglomerate is to bring WYSIWYM to the great Word-using masses; 
see the website, especially "Structured Editing and the Death of WYSIWYG" in 
the docs section.

> Any comments or suggestions?

BTW, Have a look at the conglomerate-devel mailing list; the other two 
Conglomerate lists are dead.  And be wary of the website - it's two 
years out of date (I've only got access to CVS, not to the website).

> Thanks for you time,
> -Agon
>
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