On 12 October 2012 02:36, Dan Stillman <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 10/11/12 9:58 AM, Carles Pina wrote:
> > My *personal* opinion (I'd be happy if someone proves that I'm
> > wrong!): CSL is so complex and so rich that an editor to create styles
> > from the scratch without knowing some advanced CSL concepts (macros,
> > choose, variables, types) cannot be done... or, at least, I don't see
> > at the moment how can be done. Again, I may be wrong.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Somehow it would be like building a Python/any programming language
> > user interface. It can be done, but if you want to build things from
> > the scratch you really need to understand what's underneath... tools
> > helps, IDEs helps, but doesn't avoid of studying the programming
> > language.
>
> On this point, I've wondered if it'd make sense in the current editor to
> optionally expose the underlying XML and highlight the relevant section.
> (This could be hidden by default.) As someone who's done almost no CSL
> coding, I can imagine the visual editor being a good way to learn about
> the structure of CSL files and how the various options translate to
> code, where I'd ultimately be more comfortable working. I recognize that
> I'm not exactly in the target demographic and that this is less
> important than making it easy for non-programmers to make small changes,
> but if it's easy to do this, I think it could be helpful for some users.
>
If you look at the 'Advanced' tree on the left hand side this exactly
mirrors the structure of the underlying XML so you may find this
helpful. It uses the same code as the above trees which alters the node
names to try to be more friendly, e.g. 'style' becomes 'Global Formatting
Options', 'text' nodes will alter dynamically based on the attributes, 'if'
nodes will summarise the boolean condition, etc. For nodes which have
documentation in the CSL schema, you will see the actual CSL node name in a
tooltip by hovering over the node. I was thinking of removing the
'Advanced' tree and making it optional but never got around to it because
of a slight difficulty moving the 'locale' node to the Style Info tree.
About hiding the tree view, I'm wary about doing this since it's the only
way for the user to interact with the structure of the style. Without it
the tool is very limited and I think would lead to frustration for most
users. I think educating people how to use it with some online tutorials
would be a better next step.
About creating styles from scratch. I agree that it's probably too
difficult to do in a simpler higher level way without removing much of the
flexibility of CSL. We discussed creating a wizard to generate a template
to start editing from, but it may not be that much better than just using
the Search by Example page to find a similar existing style.
>
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