Wednesday, July 30, 2008, 12:45:26 PM, Hussein Shafie wrote: > Jean Jordaan wrote: >> >> This solves one problem, but raises others .. e.g. now search and >> replace aren't global any more, but limited to chapter/section/... >> Also I think it breaks xref, right? How to have "See <xref to >> chapter>" with autogenerated content if each chapter is in its own >> file? >> > > Is that really important to see xref autogenerated content in real time? > In our opinion, the answer is no. > > Same for checking cross-references. Most of the time we concentrate on > what we are writing and from time to time (once per day), we open the > master document to check that everything is OK.
Even if that's affordable in your usage scenario (and maybe more painful for some users), that's still awkward. But it's not the main point if how much inconvenient it is, if only a little, or a lot. It's that these inconveniences and other Baroque things are symptoms, results of a deeper issue, which is that you follow this traditional way of structuring data (and even that to an extreme level, as you split a single document to multiple files). Surely it's hard to see where would you be if you start out from another philosophy from the very beginning, especially from the point that you have reached starting out from a different foundation, but I feel inside that it's not good this way. It's like, you know why is XXE good, and not just yet another WYSIWYM editor... Because it had a vision, that the hiding of the XML structure (simulating traditional word processors) is stupid, instead the editor should build on it. It won't be popular because it breaks the traditions, but that's exactly why it stands out, why it can introduce ways of editing. I think good things would come out from this tradition breaking, reforming way of looking at things, from this thinking in the true XML way, if you apply that on the higher granularity levels as well. You seem to stick to (defend) the way it currently works, and I don't know if how much it's because of deadlines and other everyday overburden (i.e., you don't miss yet another thing to rewrite), and how much is it because thinking preconditioned by habits. I any case, I think it should be reconsidered if you want to defend this current approach. I'm pretty sure it's not right, not on the long run, so it shouldn't be defended, at least not in front of yourself. If you have no resources in the foreseeable future for changing this is another thing, but it would be too bad to fall into the mistake of thinking it's the good way as it is. Splitting up to files is not hierarchical. Also, the boundaries of files are rigid and hand-made. XML documents are already hierarchical with high granularity, and even better, following the logic of the XML Schema, the information semantic. It must open more powerful ways of navigation and ad-hoc segmentation building on that. And, of course, And of course the earlier mentation inconveniences inherently wouldn't exist. -- Best regards, Daniel Dekany
