L.S., http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/limitations.html says
XMLmind XML Editor (XXE) cannot be used to edit the physical structure of an XML document (entities, CDATA sections, marked sections). Any well-formed XML document making use of these features can, of course, be opened in XXE, but as soon as the document is loaded, these constructs are expanded and forgotten. Note that this limitation is not as severe as it seems because XXE supports the authoring of modular documents (even very fine grained ones). When needed and when possible, XXE saves characters as references to character entities. XXE can be configured to save specific elements (example: XHTML script) as CDATA sections. That text implies that one can always reasonably work around this limitation, but I disagree. This limitation does seem severe for entities that stand for short fixed text that gets used a lot and that must be changed after some period of time, such as "&productversion;" to refer to the version of the product described in the document. As far as I can tell, none of the mitigating factors mentioned above can be used in this case. It can be a big chore to replace all "8" that refer to the current product version by "9", because you have to double-check that every replaced "8" really referred to the product version and not to something else, and because you may have to check a large number of individual files (because of the modularity). If I can use an entity "&productversion;" in my document and then define that to be equal to "8" in one location, then I only need to change that single definition when the document must be updated for the next version of the product. It is not a big limitation if the definition of the entities cannot be edited using XXE, but it is a severe limitation that any document that uses such entities cannot be edited using XXE. I request that the use of entitites that stand for fixed text (as opposed to entities that refer to other modules) be supported by XXE. It would be acceptable (to me) to just leave unexpanded those uses of entities (or even all entities, perhaps except for character entities) until transformation to a different kind of document (e.g., PDF) is requested. E.g., display "This manual describes OurProduct version &productversion;" just like that in XXE, rather than expanding "&productversion;" to its current value of, e.g., "8", and then completely forgetting about "&productversion;". Perhaps it would be easy to add an option to choose between expanding or not expanding entities? I'll gladly trade expansion of entities in XXE for being able to retain entities after editing in XXE. Not being able to use "XML variables" like "&productversion;" is really a major drawback of XXE, in my opinion. I'll have to figure out a way around that limitation, or else abandon XXE. Best regards, Louis Strous Consul Risk Management Delft, The Netherlands -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.xmlmind.com/pipermail/xmleditor-support/attachments/20061211/f8c964aa/attachment.htm
