Hi Hussein, I'm still in the midst of evaluating a bunch of products, and XXE still seems to rise to the top in terms of usability. But I have a few more questions for you:
How hard is it to implement a command that would combine the functionality of, say, Select Parent and Insert After? What I'd like is to be able to select the parent of the current element AND update the contents of the Insert After list in one step, and while the focus is still on the Edit tab. Here's my usage scenario: 1. User is typing text into a <para> tag. 2. User presses Ctrl+J to insert an element after <para>, but because #text is the current element, he gets a list of inline elements instead. The Edit text box is in focus. 3. User presses Ctrl+J again and the parent <para> is selected. The Edit list is updated with elements valid for inserting after the <para>. A related question: Is it possible to display the name of the current element as a label somewhere on the Edit tab? For example "Insert element after <curr_element_name>" or even just "Current element: <curr_element_name>". Finally, where does a CSS stylesheet have to exist in order to be considered "available" to be assigned to a new View? Are you considering adding Browse functionality to that dialog? Thanks, Mark -----Original Message----- From: Hussein Shafie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 1:33 AM To: Mark Fletcher Cc: xmleditor-support at xmlmind.com Subject: Re: [XXE] I LOVE your editor! Mark Fletcher wrote: > > I also received an email from Don Day (of OASIS' DITA committee) about > my similar posting on your public message board. He had this to say > about your product and DITA: > > "XXE is capable of editing the various core DITA DTDs/Schemas, but you > will have to create a config file to support them within XXE in the > same way as other Schemas are supported. The CSS files in the DITA > Open Toolkit without "classed" in their filenames will support most of > the DITA elements in XXE (topic-alt tries to accomodate XXE's > alternate list support, but it still imports CSS syntax that XXE does > not handle, so it shows many error messages at the moment). Not difficult to fix, if needed to. > The DTDs work in Standard Edition--I had verified that a few years > ago, but I do not know how the Schemas, which are structured to > support the specialization design pattern, would work in XXE Professional. I have quickly validated some of the DITA schemas (e.g. concept.xsd) and a few instances (e.g. dtdmod.dita, speclimits.dita, etc) using xsdvalid (http://www.xmlmind.com/xsdvalid.html) and everything seems to work smoothly. > There are two specific DITA behaviors that XXE cannot do (as far as I > know from testing several years ago): > > Specialization awareness: XXE does not support the use of defaulted > values of the class attribute as CSS selectors, therefore any new > specialization cannot fall back to previous stylesheets--you have to > create a new one, import the stylesheet for the previous Schema in the > derivation, and then apply any special support for your delta elements > in the new schema. Not difficult to fix, if needed to. > conref awareness: XXE is fully XInclude enabled. DITA, however, was > designed around XSLT as the primary processing architecture, and > utilizes its document() function to support content referencing in a > much more constrained manner. XXE being a source tree editor > primarily will not effect this transform-oriented form of > transclusion. I suspect that you can write Java to convert a content > reference into an XInclude directive and thus feed the expected syntax > to XXE for a preview mode, but that is not out-of-the-box." Don't know how difficult it is to cope with this feature. > It sounds like he tried your editor several years ago, so I'm not sure > if his info is still up-to-date. Can you comment at all on his comments? Don Day's info seems to be quite up-to-date. We are currently studying DITA (we started doing that just a few days *before* you send us your email) and we are considering supporting this XML architecture out of the box (probably not in the free Standard Edition though). Now we cannot give you our word that this will be done (and when it will be done). For example, we considered supporting TEI out of the box and we finally dropped this project.
