Daniel Dekany wrote: > > I guess Hussein will correct me if I got their intent wrong, but... > maybe the key would be to achieve that they realize that XXE is not > meant to show you the documents as it will look like printed, and not > only because it would be slow and hard to implement, but because it's > not its approach. XXE don't want to hide from the editor that (s)he is > working with an XML node tree. Not at all. What I like in XXE is > exactly that I (more-less) "feel" where I am in the XML node tree, > that I can precisely edit, precisely control the node tree, and yet I > see something that is much easier to survey than that mess of XML tags > that you see with a "plain text" editor. Now, in the generic case, too > much formatting, like floating or absolute positioned stuff (not to > mention transformations that real XSL style-sheet have to do) would > make controlling the node tree harder. Certainly display:compact > wouldn't hurt (it doesn't rearrange visually the nodes), but if your > editors look like XXE as this, an XML node tree level editor, these > things won't trouble them that much. Well, the only question is if > they like the idea of node-tree-level editing... I would think that > this possibility is the a main advantage of using these typical XML > schemas over MS World and like. >
You are absolutely right. A long time ago, I worked during 3 months on a structured (pre-SGML) editor called Grif. At that time, the project lead of Grif was Jean Paoli, now of the XML+Microsoft fame. And the competitor of Grif was an Arbortext's product, the ancestor of Epic. After I stopped working on Grif's code, I used Grif a lot to write some documentation. This editor: * was *truly* WYSIWYG. * was intended to be used by *secretaries* (after quite a bit of training!) and therefore, worked at a very abstract level compared to XXE. After a lot of brainstorming, we, XMLmind, decided that, in the case of structured documents, "less is more" and we decided to do the opposite of Grif. I saying this just to stress the fact that the design of XXE is not naive.
