Hi John,
On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 11:15:37 -0700 (PDT), "John L. Utz III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> I have an idea.....
>
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Ovidiu Predescu wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 15:03:43 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > > I was thinking more along the lines of opening an XML file and having ECB
> >
> > How would see such an user interface?
> >
> > One possibility I see right now is to combine semantic with speedbar
> > or ECB, and show in the window a hierarchical view of the XML
> > document. I'm a little worried though that for large documents this
> > gets easily out of control.
>
> use selective display! as in 'M2Cx$' if the doc was over a certain size,
> you could just invoke selective display on startup.
>
> i think that this is a really neat idea and would create a tool that would
> hold it's own against any number of expensive proprietary tools.
>
> * (note that i actually think that it does hold it's own already, but this
> might make it significantly more intuitive for the typical new xml/xslt
> user) *
I'm not familiar with the notion of selective display. Can you please
elaborate on it a little bit?
>From what I saw so far, there are at least three ways to represent an
XML document.
One is the XML tree representation, which shows the nesting of the XML
elements in a collapsible tree. This has the advantage of quickly
navigating through your document. The disadvantage is when the
document is either large or has a deep nesting of XML elements, in
which case navigating the tree becomes really difficult.
Another representation is the tabular representation, where you show
repetitive XML elements as a table. Clicking on an cell in the table
expands the XML element further, possibly in another table. This has
an obvious advantage for simple XML documents where the data is
repetitive and the XML hierarchy is not deep. The disadvantage is that
if your data is not of this kind, the table view tends to expand
horizontally and vertically quite a bit.
The other well known representation is of course the plain XML
document, which personally I prefer. I like the folding of XML
elements provided by PSGML better than showing them in a tree or in a
table, but this is my preference. The element navigation provided by
PSGML is also very nice. However other people might find the tree and
tabular representation better than this one.
Is it worthwhile trying to implement something like the first two
views? The tree view might be simple to do, but the tabular view seems
quite complex and not very well suited for Emacs.
Regards,
--
Ovidiu Predescu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://orion.nsr.hp.com/ (inside HP's firewall only)
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/7464/ (GNU, Emacs, other stuff)
