Friday, May 25, 2007, 6:09:51 PM, Hussein Shafie wrote: > 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.
Let me be bit picky here. I think it's not that typical case of "less is more" with XXE. Its that it has a different approach, and it should be remain true to that, and part of that is not supporting whatever wild formatting. But I hope you (XXE developers) don't want to apply the "less is more" approach in other senses. > I saying this just to stress the fact that the design of XXE is not > naive. I think with XXE there is a serious danger that users expect a usual WYSIWYG thing, and so they "don't get it", and will be disappointed. Thus, I belive it would be important for XXE to communicate this idea of XXE to new users at well visible place. -- Best regards, Daniel Dekany
