Monday, May 21, 2007, 6:47:55 PM, Hussein Shafie wrote: > Frankly, I don't understand. You seem to think that: > > [1] Out of the box, XXE is not yet good enough to write a serious > DocBook or DITA documents. And that, may be one day, after a lot of hard > work, XXE will be good enough.
Basically, yes. Except I think it is not a *lot* of hard work, compared to what was invested so far, I think it's almost there. > [2] A 250-page document slows down XXE so much that it becomes barely > usable. No, I don't think its slow for that. If I want to switch to a navigation view and then *back*, now that's slow. But this switching back and forth could be avoided, and that was my point. > [3] The document structure view is not a usable navigation view. Well, it's clearly lame for that very purpose I have raised in its own thread, considering all the tricks you have to be done (see in its won thread). But as I said, it's nothing like involving NASA is needed to solve this. It's rather just a GUI issue. A low hanging fruit as far as I can see. > [4] Links should behave like normally like in any Web browser. Just what the big deal with that? Simplified, I said firing the "go there" action on a blue underlined thing (not with left-click, I didn't meant that) should just go there no matter where you are inside that blue underlined thing, and then later saying that "go back" should just go back where you come from. Is that something heretical? :) > [5] With the level of CSS support XXE has today, you cannot decently > style your custom DTDs without doing enormous efforts. Man, don't be that sensitive... I said that the vertical margin collapsing bug is a serious bug in the CSS implementation. Because, as matter of act, it is that, as far as a CSS implementation is concerned. And of course it is a PITA when you have to work that around, but of course it's not like the end of the world. Like I can even survive with some unneeded vertical space. (Considering that I have survived editing said DocBook XML in JEdit till now, you can believe I can survive many things, and so do other users. But it's not the goal, is it? We have common interest here: making XXE better.) > So my question is: why you are using our product? Personnally, I would > not use such immature software. Oh well here we are... see later. > We do not beg for compliments and we are not especially self-satisfied > with what we do, but, from our point of view, please note that: > > [1] XXE is a mature software, which is almost 5 years old. Therefore do > not expect spectacular changes. So, I didn't say or think XXE is a *such* [sic] immature software, that it is slow in general, nor do I think I have expected changes that could be called spectacular, etc, etc. But whatever, you just seem to be offended or maybe afraid that I'm bad of your business, and hence overreacting. (No offense on my side.) Basically, you seem to become offended because I say that XXE has the potential to become a real serious document editor... Well that meant to be compliment, for Christ sake. Think about MS World or OpenOffice Write *on its own filed*, and that's what I call mature/serious. I believe XXE is not there in its own field, and in fact as far as I know nothing on the field where XXE plays is there. (Which is strange anyway, as the US military uses SGML for documentation for ages... what do they use for editing those really huge documentations? Arbortext? Well, that looks like something that takes itself seriously, but I had no chance to try that, as they don't give me a chance. Anyway I'm certain that is a damn expensive stuff.) > [2] We are ourselves heavy-duty XXE users. We see no performance > problems other than the usual slow startup time of Java and its usual > slow JIT compilation time (i.e. everything is slow the first time you do > it.) > > We know a couple of writers who have written 1000-page, non modular (a > bad idea indeed), books using XXE. However, these books didn't contain > hundred of images. Well, again, I'm sorry if you think what I said is bad for your business or offending to your character or whatnot. Nonetheless, proofs like how old the software is, and who has used it for what just doesn't mater for me when I see what I see with my own eyes, and run into what I run into myself, you see. (Because in fact people can massively use crap software especially if there is no (well known) alternative. No, I don't meant that XXE is crap, yet that 1000000 people have used something for whatnot serious thing, sorry, but that doesn't means much for me anymore.) > [3] Right. The document structure view has just been created to show off > and nothing else. > > Using multiple views of the same document is always a bad idea. Well, whatever, I seem to be stuck with that currently. Creating a bottom view, dragging the separator bar, and so on... > The styled view is always sufficient. That doesn't mean, however, that a navigation view couldn't turn out to be quite helpful when maintaining big XML-s. I guess it would be. Maybe just until you didn't have it, you don't know you have missed it. (It's like the evolution of any other software genres... simple things you couldn't live without now was not present for tens of years, like even clipboard, yet almost nobody felt they are missing. Same thing.) > We rather collapse chapters and sections when we work on ``large'' > documents. Yeah, I just wanted to ask what you do when you have to find a certain section in a big book that you want to update. So... collapsing. How could I try this section collapsing feature? > I've recently found that the document structure view makes it handy > copying chapter and section IDs in order to ``paste them as olinks'' in > the document I was editing. (That's the only use I've found for the > document structure view.) > > [4] XXE is not a web browser. XXE is an XML editor. You cannot expect > navigation between hypertext links to behave like in a Web browser. I don't know if I can or can't, I only know that it would be useful, and I believe not only for me at all. > It would be very difficult to achieve something really consistent if > we tried to implement that. That you know the best for sure. I just would like to add that it doesn't need to survive all kind of documentation changes and like, it's enough if it works in the most common cases, otherwise it can gray itself out. The application in my mind was that when you maintain a documentation, you kind of reading it as well. So, like normal readers you often want to "activate" a link, and then go back. > OTOH, you'll not find the "Go to opposite link end"/"Go to next > link"/"Go to previous link" in Web browsers. > > [5] We managed to style the whole DocBook (including complex > functionprototypes in refentry) and the whole DITA with the level of CSS > support XXE has today and this, despite the important bug you have reported. I just put this into the angry reaction category. (You have already read my answer to this topic earlier. The surviving thing.) -- Best regards, Daniel Dekany
