+1 (on jEdit awesomeness, and the uselessness of outline view for markup)
-----Original Message-----
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:]
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 2:06 AM
To: Bob Foster
Cc:
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] XML-appropriate editing data structures
At 9:08 PM -0500 4/7/04, Bob Foster wrote:
>However, the expectations of a modern XML editor are set by the
>features of modern programming language editors:
As someone who wrote a 1200 page book, completely in XML in the very
high-performing jEdit, and another 300 page book in the XML editor
known as OpenOffice, I have to question a lot of your assumptions
about what features a modern XML editor should have. For instance, I
find outline view completely useless. It seems to get into editors
only because modern GUI toolkits make it trivial to implement (at
least until documents stop being small), not because users actually
want to edit their documents as outlines.
I think an editor that began by asking how users actually want to
edit XML data would avoid a lot of the performance problems you've
encountered, simply by not implementing unnecessary features. I see
no reason that the feature set of an XML editor should be a copy of
the feature set of a modern programming language editor. I want very
different things when I'm editing XML than when I'm writing code.
They are not the same task. They are not even close.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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