>> been doing a lot of complex web development lately
Re: complex web development, I assume you are using some kind of HTML
templating framework such as PHP or Django.
With straight HTML it's pretty straight forward to update the page based on
the buffer, but once you start talking about dynamic things start to get a
little more complicated.
You also have CSS to deal with; internal styles embedded in the <head> tag
or in element style attributes are fairly easy. However, what if you want to
view some specific HTML, generated with PHP, how would you update live as
you modified some CSS? These are the sort of facilities that would make
LivePreview truly useful and are the nuts I want to crack.
As of now here are some my thoughts (subject to evolution):
First thing I will do is create the basic Wrapper Class of FireFox with
PyXPCOM
Next I will do the binding of all documented methods and properties,
automating the process using HTML screen scraping (BeautifulSoup Library)
This will give me a great sandbox to experiment with creative solutions
to the above
Editing HTML inside PHP:
Basic concept:
I will keep a copy of all the text nodes and their DOM
sourceIndex cached
You can search these to see if they contain the text currently
being edited and update where possible
InternetExplorer actually has a TextRange object, where you can
easily search and replace just the text in the DOM.
Implementing similar convenience functions would be on the
agenda.
How would you make the live Preview as flicker free as possible?
Investigate the possibility of forcing the browser to do
offscreenBuffering. IE has such a facility.
How would you update a Page's styles live while editing external CSS?
Not really sure just yet.
Based on some prototyping with Internet Explorer and COM I think with time
and some help these problems could be solved.
From: vim_dev@googlegroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of George V. Reilly
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 5:43 AM
To: vim_dev@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code Idea, VIM live, update as you type,
preview of HTML
On 28/03/2008, sc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Friday 28 March 2008 08:02, Nicholas Dudfield wrote:
> I am interested in doing a GSOC project for the VIM
> organization and I would like to get feedback on the idea.
>
> * Summary *
>
> A Mozilla Browser automation and DOM manipulation class
> with built in documentation via docstrings
> Live preview API with the functionality commonly needed
> already programmed. A live preview example using VIM with
> python extensions.
>
> This would be of great benefit to all web developers using
> VIM.
to me this sounds very interesting, and very useful
This is the first GSoC proposal that I've seen float past that really made
me perk up, probably because I've been doing a lot of complex web
development lately. The other proposals are worthy, but not as exciting to
me.
--
/George V. Reilly [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.georgevreilly.com/blog http://blogs.cozi.com/tech
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist.
For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
