Re: Editing tools

Yes, I realise that there are a class of text editors that support XML. I
hadn't included any of them yet. The purpose of the list is to convince
people that they can use an editor in a familiar mode (some kind of wysiwyg
via XML+CSS normally) to edit XML if that's what we want to do.

This is for people who are not hand coding XHTML, such as me and most of my
collaborators.


Cheers

Charles

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, David Carlisle wrote:


  > In the notes to the meeting there was a discussion of tools that can be used
  > - one of the reasons for working with an XHTML source instead of the spec dtd
  > was that it is easier to find friendly HTML editing tools than XML editing
  > tools. (Especially for those of us with Macintoshes)

  Yes I saw that (can't say I'd agree with it from personal experience,
  but still it's a reasonable point of view) but what I wasn't sure about
  was the purpose of the list of editors. If the reason for hand authoring
  XHTML is that some people are more familiar with (X)HTML editors, then
  surely they'll just use whatever editor they are used to, won't they?
  Or is there an intention that W3C "Recommend" some particular set of
  editing tools for document production?

  > For a number of collaborators working in native XML is not a helpful
  > suggestion, and for others it is less efficient

  It seems a sad reflection on XML if that is really the case.
  I thought the whole point of XML (for document use rather than as a data
  holder) was that one could use an efficient and concise markup closely
  tailored to the job at hand and then have production tools expand that
  out to whatever necessary presentation forms were required.
  In the particular example of W3C documents it's surely much more
  "efficient" to use the front matter markup from xmlspec and have that
  expand into the boilerplate HTML/CSS required, than to type the latter
  directly. It is also _far_ easer to constrain things so that the result
  meets the document guidelines.

  >  - overuse injuries are
  > aggravated by dealing with the tag trivia. Not that working with emacs (or vi
  > or notepad or whatever) is evil, just that it is not for everyone.

  Yes but I was suggesting emacs be listed under the "XML aware" editors
  rather than an acsii editor like notepad. If by "overuse injuries" you
  mean typing </foo> too often then emacs, like other XML aware editors,
  will automatically insert such tagging, offer context sensitive
  alternatives, validate the document etc.  I don't mean to start an
  "editor wars" thread (fun but unproductive, as a rule) just trying to
  understand the criterion being used to generate this list of editing
  systems (and what use is planned for the list).

  David

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-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
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Received on Thursday, 8 March 2001 06:37:14 UTC