John Anderson wrote:
Based on the amount of time we spent on parcel XML, I suspect that if the amount of work to build/maintain yet another XML format is not much different from the amount of work to build a simple GUI builder, and I think the GUI builder has a bigger payoff.Well, I'm done and it took me two and a half days including converting the existing UI to this format, and then there is maintenance. Actually, it's not that XML is hard to learn, it's learning the concepts you need to encode in XML (e.g. CPIA) and how they map to XML.like what? give me an example that applies to most CPIA blocks - not complex singleton blocks like the sidebar though. This also isn't an end-all-be-all solution to all of CPIA... hence the lack of flexibility that I already said was a non-goal. There's nothing stopping people from doing complex CPIA in Python. This is for simple stuff - for declaring the skeleton that holds the UI together - the menus, the toolbars, etc - simple things like menus (16 of them including submenus) MenuItems (84), Events (73) ToolbarItems (9) - etc... do we really want to maintain these things in Python? Almost nobody uses xrc directly, it's the format that is edited by the GUI tools.Fair enough. Regarding errors, I've spent much more time trying to figure out Parcel XML errors than I ever spend figuring out python errors. Usually this is due to the limitations of parsing XML with tools we use -- they just don't give you the same granularity as the Python compiler.No, that was a limitation of the parcel.xml schema - it was so generalized that instead of being able to say "Block xxx is referencing an unknown event xxx" when your event attribute's itemref had a typo, it would say things like "unresolved reference from parcel xxx, item xxx reference xxx" The problem with such a generalized schema is that the loader had to be so complex it couldn't figure out where an error originated. I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten the parcel XML message that say nothing useful, or the number of times I've had to comment out the parcel XML exception handler to figure out where the error really occurred.*shrug* That's really not a function of xml or the tools involved. Don't blame XML for the problems of parcel XML. Alec |
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