Alex Milowski wrote: > > On Monday, December 15, 2003, at 02:50 AM, Hussein Shafie wrote: > >>> May be to stress the difference to the CSS specification, instead of >>> the name "counters" a proprietary name could be used, e.g. "index", >>> "numbering" or so. >> >> >> You are right but it is a bit too late to change this for current >> counter/counters which are already different from the CSS specification. >> > > As you need to continue to diverge from the CSS specification to make > this editor > a better product, have you ever considered just making this your own > style language?
Frankly no. CSS is fine. This language is well-documented and not intimidating for the Power User like, say, XSLT. Yes, we have added a few proprietary extensions to it. But in the case of XML documents (as opposed to XML data) you can style 99% of the document without having to use our proprietary extensions. > There is so much to explain as to what is different and it is unknown > where CSS is > going. Since editors like yours are not in the CSS working group's > goals, it is > conceivable that they will make some "fatal mistake" that will hurt your > product. CSS3 selectors are fine. Specifying namespaces in CSS3 is OK too. I don't know other evolutions at all. In fact, some of our proprietary extensions are future-standard-CSS3. > Another option would be XSL Formatting Objects. You'd have the > flexibility you > need for generated content and extensibility is built into the > specification. The > only tricky bit (which is quite possible) is handling the back pointers > to the > content from the formatting objects. > > In general, it would be possible to have multiple FO's for the same > content. You'd > have to decide whether you want to support this. It would seem that > your "content view" > API would handle this just fine. > > Just a thought... XSL-FOs are great too, and they are not hard to learn. But we do not expect to drastically change XXE in the future. See planned features: http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/detailed_features.html#planned Our goal is to create an affordable, extensible, structured content authoring *solution*. In our opinion, the authoring tool, XXE, is just *half the solution*. The other half is an extensible, affordable, lightweight, intelligent backend (that is, not like <put_the_name_of_your_favorite_content_management_system_here>). We would really like to explore this area in the near future.
