[Marc Petit]
> Hi ! I develop software, and I discovered Dia yesterday. It seems great
> to me. I've never used Visio, so I can't tell which one is better (no
> doubt Dia, for being open source is a great quality ;-).
[Alexander Larsson replies]
> Sorry, Dia is all about presentation. And that is just the way it is. It
> has no concept of the hierarchical data structures the diagram might
> represent. This is a concious design choise. Dia is made for drawing
> pretty pictures.
If you're really keen on content/structure over form, you might want to
take a look at DOME:
http://www.htc.honeywell.com/dome/
In a sense, DOME is the opposite of Dia: you can *only* draw things that
are permitted by some visual grammar, where a visual grammar is
something like "UML class diagram" or "dataflow diagram". The good news
is that it ships with 12 or 15 built-in visual grammars, and has a
mechanism to let you define your own. (I haven't tried it, but I would
venture to guess that it's easier than Dia's code-it-in-C approach, but
possibly harder than Dia's describe-it-in-XML approach. All conjecture,
of course!)
Also, DOME has some support for hierarchical models; I've only played a
bit and haven't really figured out what's going on there. It *sounds*
neat, though. ;-)
The upside of DOME is that it's *really* easy to create very structured
diagrams using one of the available visual grammars. The downside is
that there is no stepping outside the box: you can't add text or bubbles
or lines at will; everything must fit within the rules defined by the
particular visual grammar that you're using. (This is presumably a
feature.) If you want freehand drawing, use a freehand drawing tool
like Dia.
Greg
