Dear sir(s),
like nearly every XML editor I've found, your product seems to miss an
option that is so obviously useful in XML editing that people tend to
forget it's something that speeds up the creation and updating process:
search and replace in a node path context.
Not just "find text [ ....] and replace with [....]" but "find text [
....] and replace with [....] in [...]".
As an example, I am currently faced with poorly designed XML describing
Japanese ideographs, and have a few thousand entries of the following
XML (with japanese content in ISO-2022-JP) format:
<kanji value="83">
<written>"?"</written>
<...>
<readings>
<onyomi>
<pronunciation>?</pronunciation>
<meaning>non-existance</meaning>
<example>
<japanese>???<ruby><rb>??</rb><rt>??<
/rt></ruby>???</japanese>
<english>That is not possible.</english>
</example>
</onyomi>
<kunyomi>
<pronunciation>?[?]</pronunciation>
<meaning>negation marker</meaning>
<example>
<japanese><ruby><rb>??</rb><rt>??<
/rt></ruby>?<ruby><rb>?</rb><rt>?< /rt></ruby>??<ruby><rb>?</rb><rt><
/rt>?</ruby>???????</japanese>
<english>I told you there was no meaning to it.</english>
</example>
</kunyomi>
<special>
<example>
<japanese><ruby><rb>???</rb><rt>????< /rt></ruby></japanese>
<english>fig</english>
</example>
</special>
</readings>
<...>
</kanji>
This is poor XML for several reasons, but one of the is that the
examples inside <reading> tags are sentence examples while examples
inside <special> tags are single word examples. What I would expect is
to be able to quickly do a blind search and replace on a subset on these
tags. XSLT or Xtransform are out of the question because it'd take too
long to write out in comparison to the following rather simple solution:
find [<example> ]
replace [<example type="sentence"> ]
in path [document/kanji/readings/*yomi]
I hit "Replace All", the program races through the few thousand entries
and only updates <example> tags that conform to this path. The tags in
<special> are untouched and I can do a second search/replace for them by
updating them to [<example type="word">] now using the same principle,
replacing "*yomi" with "special" instead. The whole operation only takes
me a few seconds, and never shifts my focus away from editing the XML,
unlike programming XSLT or Xtransforms would.
This is a very good thing, it allows me to stay on the job.
It's odd that no XML editor seems to have this function (yet?); it's
intuitive, and bloody handy for updating large quantities of relatively
small errors like these, for which writing XML conversion scripts is
really an unnecessary task. Adding it into your product, especially
since it's JAVA based, would be reasonably easy to do (after all, the
SAX2 model essentially natively allows path checking) and would result
in an increase in functionality that would most likely be highly
appreciated by many XML designers and editors.
I hope to find this feature in a future version of your XML editor.
Sincerely,
Mike Kamermans
programmer, editor, webmaster and potential customer.
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