Sean Russell wrote: > > Sorry. Is there a better place to post these?
No. This is the right place. > One of the goals of XXE is (or should be, because it is a critical goal for > wide acceptance) to hide as much as possible the document structure details > from the user. I'm convinced that this is not possible or at least very, very difficult to achieve. Netscape/Mozilla Composer does this but just for HTML (I have never used DreamWeaver, FrontPage). Do you know any generic XML editor which *really* succeeds at "hiding as much as possible the document structure details from the user"? I also often ask myself (by laziness, probably to justify our approach, etc) is this feature really desirable? I do not program in assembly language. I program in a high-level language: Java. I'm not interested in being exposed to assembly language. But in the case of structured documents, the document structure is not a low-level thing you want to hide: it is high-level information with strong semantics. Is it desirable to hide this just because people are not used to it? > There is no reason why a user shouldn't be allowed to insert any element from > the ancestors of the current branch, as long as the schema allows. For > example, if the user is in > /chapter/sect1/sect2/sect3/example/para/itemizedlist/listitem/para > and they choose to insert-after, they /should/ be offered the option of > inserting nearly all of the ancestors of the current node; IE, sect1, sect2, > sect3, example, para, itemizedlist, and listitem. Technically, they should > also be able to insert any of the legal siblings thereof. > > Now, adding all of the siblings to the tree would admittedly quickly render > the choose list unusable because of the size. Also, it would probably slow > down XXE considerably. Yes. > However, adding just the legal ancestors to the list > I think is a reasonable compromise because the number of extra element > choices will always be relatively small It depends on the DTD/XML Schema. > and because wanting to add those > elements is a /common/ user desire. This would, IME, remove 80% of the need > to select the node you want to insert around. This would be a valuable > feature for both insert-after and insert-before, and would decrease the > learning curve for people to whom the XML-based aspect of XXE is incidental, > rather than central. These people just want a word processor, not an XML > tree editor. I understand. I hope that by customizing XXE you'll be able to partially implement what you describe for a specific DTD (no programming involved: just macro-commands specified in configuration files. This will be described in the Power User's Guide.) But in the short term, we don't have the resources to experiment this idea using a native implementation. Sorry.
