On Monday, March 31, 2003, at 12:58 AM, Hussein Shafie wrote: > Ronald Hayden wrote: >> >> Are there plans for a more functional tree view? > > No. The whole point of XXE is to never have to use the tree view :-) Of > course, this means writing CSS style sheets.
I'm not sure style sheets are related to the issue at hand, which is easily altering the document by grabbing a node...when you are just moving things around (whole chapters, or functions in a reference), it's often much nicer to do it in the tree than in the style view. Personally, I see the tree as a legitimate approach to editing. It frequently makes more sense for me to edit there than in style view...especially when you insert an element, and four or five sub-elements are dropped in for you. I find that difficult to deal with in style view, but a snap in tree view. Also, this is more convenient for the case we've discussed of editing without a DTD (that's not what our writers would be doing, but is something I am frequently doing as a part of tools development). > XXE, unlike FrameMaker+SGML (I think), is natively always in an editing > mode constrained by a DTD/XMLSchema (when there is no DTD/XMLSchema, an > internal ``unconstrained document type'' is used). That means that the > ``dropability'' of an element has to be checked as you drag it over > other elements and over space between elements. Frame uses a DTD but allows for an illegal placement; if an element is illegal, you get red lines in the tree view letting you know that. I know this may just not be possible in the existing XXE model, but we've found it fits the writer process to be able to make illegal placements. They can push and pull to get things where they want, and then fix up the elements correctly. > More seriously, your request is a reasonable one but requires a lot of > work. I can understand that one! Well, I find XXE to be a very promising editor, so I'll just keep bugging you about the little things that would make it even better...:) -- Ron
