Advice on XML editor development

[Matt Mower]

On Mon, 27 Apr 1998 12:38:54 +0000, Peter Murray-Rust
<peter at ursus.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>>2.	It be based entirely pre-prepared DTD's
>
>I take this to mean "you can only use it if you have a DTD, but it will
>accept any DTD", rather than "a set of DTDs must be hardwired in (as in
>HTML editors)"
>

Yes that is exactly what I meant.

>	It should support tree-based and stream-based editing (my guess is that
>you were primarily thinking of streams)
>

I'm not familiar enough with the terminology here. I'll tell you what I
think the difference is. A tree based editor is something like XMLPro
which displays a document as a hierarchy of objects, a stream based
editor is something like composer where you type free-text (albeit in a
structured manner).

If the above is accurate then my intention is for this to be a
tree-based editor. With DTD elements acting as "objects" that can be
manipulated sensibly.

>	It should support ID/IDREF and xml:link in a graphical manner (e.g.
>dragon-drop)
>

I'm not sure what this.

>	It should be possible to embed images (and possibly other non-textual
>material)
>

Yes in some form or other.

>	It should allow searching ('Find')
>

Certainly.

>	It should support entity management.
>

That's probably less of an issue for us (in our specific intention at
the moment) but I would accept it in general.

>Note that there is a lot of experience in the SGML (sic) community about
>creating editors and it's worth talking to experienced people and getting
>demos to find out exactly what the range of things you really want is.
>>

Can you suggest a forum in which I could raise this issue?

>'every stage' means that every keystroke in a text window must be checked
>for validity. It would be impossible to type a start tag without the end
>tag. So I suspect you will allow some relaxation of this :-)
>

No tag typing. The idea is that when an element is selected a tool bar
will offer all valid sub-elements. Clicking the button creates the
element and offers a wizard for filling in attributes and so forth. I
really don't want users to know that XML is going on in the background.

>1. The com.sun.java.swing class library is undoubtedly the single most
>powerful Java resource that I know about. It's freely available, the source
>

I have reliability concerns about swing. In principle though I do agree
with you.

Best regards.

Matt.

-- 
Matt Mower, Information Systems Team, University of North London
T: +44-(0)171-753-3288 F: +44-(0)171-753-5120 E: m.mower at unl.ac.uk


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