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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Eric Laffoon on Tuesday 10/Sep/2002, @18:59
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> The thing that keeps me from using Quanta as opposed to Bluefish is the lack of as many xhtml options as the latter provides.
You know I have to admit I haven't looked at Bluefish since the days of Quanta 1.0. So I don't even know if it has a document structure tree, loadable toolbars, programmable actions, templates, loadable DTDs, auto-completion, integrated script processing with any language that runs in the shell, advanced project options of any of the other things I depend on Quanta for. I know it doesn't have DCOP, kio, khtml, KDE's great file dialogs and a lot more. In a few weeks we will have a bunch more things like Active DTD parsing for auto-complete, code completion for local PHP classes and functions, and full DTD switching which removes vestiges of HTML for XML docs not to mention a very cool scriptable dialog builder called kommander...
Effectively for 3.0 adding XHTML support begins with opening an XHTML document which means you have autocomplete for XHTML provided your DTD is pointed to can can be read. Further support only requires a more in depth description.rc file, tag files for dialogs and any toobar files. None of which requires anything more than a basic understanding of XML. I'm thinking you're going to get some benefits from the total package...
So the only question really is why I haven't heard from you asking to do XHTML tag files or some part, if this is what is keeping you from using Quanta.
I would just really like to ask people to actually read what we're doing now instead of basing their opinions on where we were six months ago. Quanta has several people putting full time effort into making it a killer app and three dozen people on the developer mailing list of which a dozen contribute code. If you blink you will be discussing yesterdays's news.
I know some people just don't read up or download before dispensing opinions... but I can dream. ;-)
FYI people we are working on a zillion issues to make Quanta do all the things everyone wants it to do. It will take one person no more than a few evenings for complete XHTML support to be added and then we can package it so you can extract it, run an install script, restart Quanta and enjoy. Will that one person please email me? |
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Wrenkin on Tuesday 10/Sep/2002, @21:00
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I didn't say it's a bad app :) Bluefish does some of those things, but feature development seems to have slowed with the transition to GTK2. I actually downloaded Quanta PR2 on a routine dist-upgrade, but last saw PR1.
I didn't ask for the functionality because Bluefish plain gave it to me. Quanta is a high quality program, but it was simply a case of what app had what capability at the time. I've only recently come back to KDE3.x, after using Windowmaker since abandoning KDE1.x. The fact that Quanta had the benefits of KDE integration seemed largely irrelevant (indeed, I still like Galeon more than using Konq/khtml for its rendering capabilities, even if the interface seems out of place amidst my 1/2-functional Keramik style). If Quanta gained these new xhtml capabilities, then I'd probably use it for the sake of consistency, and make use of/become attached to its other obvious benefits. But frankly I didn't see the need to alert anyone of my problem as it simply wasn't much of a concern.
Users are jerks :) It's pretty impossible to read what we want, I know, but that's what happens. I didn't file a complaint because at the time I didn't care if it was fixed or not. It would have been courteous, I admit, but I'm sure some developer had heard of XHTML1.0/1.1, or Ruby tags, etc, and was aware that you lacked the necessary rc files.
Quite simply, as an Economics and Philosophy student I go with whatever works now, as long as it satisfies my political/ethical criteria ;) Tommorow I might be running Gnome2. Who knows ;)
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Eric Laffoon on Tuesday 10/Sep/2002, @22:38
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> The fact that Quanta had the benefits of KDE integration seemed largely irrelevant
They would be if those benefits didn't extend well beyond the fact that KDE goes well with KDE. As a developer we are able to focus on just what we need with the highest level of code reuse I know of anywhere. People ask about remote file operations or request sftp... I point out kio and fish. People ask for line numbering and soft word wrap... we use the kate part and have one of two this time around. However many of the features and very cool code have yet to really solidfy in the utterly exceptional. It takes a few years to flesh out and demonstrate structural benefits to their fullest. The point is that we are able to move much faster and develop muich richer because of architectural choices. One of the coolest things coming is kommander which will make Quanta and other KDE apps user extensible to a near unlimited degree provided they make good use of DCOP.
> Users are jerks :) It's pretty impossible to read what we want, I know, but that's what happens.
Actually I get a good read from my feedback. I woudn't say users are jerks either, but if you pressed I might be willing to make an excpetion. ;-) The fact is I get an incredibly positive and grateful stream of daily email. I would have to say our user base has been some of the nicest people I've met on the web. You might want to make a note of the following...
> I'm sure some developer had heard of XHTML1.0/1.1, or Ruby tags, etc, and was aware that you lacked the necessary rc files.
Having heard of it is not the issue. Being aware that we lacked rc files is not something they would know as these ae new changes. Here's what I did. I made a determination to make a radical architectural departure from beig an HTML editor. Most users don't even do compiles but load rpms and we run 35,000 downloads with a handful of developers. Do the math. If you understand OO coding in any language you understand abstraction. We're not going to set the world on fire with C++ coders laboriously coding in the support for another language. Who knows how many users have actually expressed gratitude to me wishing they could code to contrubute. now they finally can! We are going through all the functionality of what Quanta does and making it pluggable... In other words we are making it user upgradable! Everything is being redesigned to elimiate redundancy, reduce effort, simplify processes and invite experimentation and estension.
In simple terms we no longer need to start from scratch when you want to use a new tag language or XML dialect and add Ruby instead of Perl or PHP or whatever. Traditionally these are handled by programmers compiling permutatioin after permutation. No more. Now the document will be disected, managed and merged accoring to rule sets we will make accessable for advanced users. But first of all, did you get that any markup language is supported by accessing the DTD? You have auto-complete and soon a degree of validation built in... and in the coming months this level of service will happen without a single bit of internal support being written! As for scripting languages, we pulled over 2660 PHP functions for auto-complete from the docs with a perl script today.
Like I said, blink and you will be talking ancient history. Put another way, XHTML is no longer a support issue because in the coming weeks anybody who can write XHTML/XML/HTML can can do it right in Quanta. If you can find the DTD, define how you want parent and child relationships handled in the structure tree, descibe where on a grid you want dialog elements for dialogs and point and click some toolbars you have just brought it to the level of functionality of our current HTML. Howeever if you can find the DTD on file open you still have features with no time invested.
Like I said, blink and you will be talking ancient history.
> Quite simply, as an Economics and Philosophy student I go with whatever works now
From the economics standpoint would you rather have the C++ developers reading language docs and assembling tags and toolbars or less than 1% of users, who work in those environments, setting them up while development continues? From the philosophical viewpoint do you think it is preferable to hop through the community with the view that personal enrichment only comes from consuming or is there some profit believing in something and contributing something to it's growth... especially knowing if no one felt that way you would be stuck with the best you could buy. Because no one would care to empower you, only to find what worked. An extension of that argument is that I could buy websphere for what I have invested and continue to on Quanta. So my needs must extend far beyond simply having a tool for a task. I do hope you are not majoring in existentialism. ;-)
> as long as it satisfies my political/ethical
Hmmm? I don't want to touch that really. I am deeply convicted that our freedoms and future are going to be decided by how we allow distributions of power and wealth to affect the flow and exchange of knowledge. So I feel strongly about impacting the world around me to empower others and offer superior alternatives even if it means great personal sacrifice. To do less is to hand over the future without even a whimper. However my poilitics would surely chase you away... Then I would loose all that revenue from licensing. Damn!
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Ingo Klöcker on Wednesday 11/Sep/2002, @02:56
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> From the economics standpoint would you rather have the C++ developers
> reading language docs and assembling tags and toolbars or less than 1% of
> users, who work in those environments, setting them up while development
> continues?
Not supporting the current standard which is XHTML 1.0/1.1 is IMO a serious lack. Saying that a C++ programmer is overqualified to do it is a lame excuse. You can't seriously intend to release Quanta 3.0 without full support for XHTML 1.0. If no user steps up and adds the support then someone of the developers will have to bite into the sour apple (German saying) and add it.
As I write my webpages in XHTML I need this. But I don't have the time to add it to Quanta since I'm busy developing KMail.
Anyway, thanks for a wonderful program!
Regards,
Ingo
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Andras Mantia on Wednesday 11/Sep/2002, @03:26
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Ok, I've noted your point of view. I will bring this up on the devel list.
Andras
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 11/Sep/2002, @04:05
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> Not supporting the current standard which is XHTML 1.0/1.1 is IMO a serious lack.
> Saying that a C++ programmer is overqualified to do it is a lame excuse. You can't
> seriously intend to release Quanta 3.0 without full support for XHTML 1.0. If no
> user steps up and adds the support then someone of the developers will have to bite
> into the sour apple (German saying) and add it.
Well thanks a lot Ingo! The validity of your point seems less important than the fact that people tend to take the path of least resistance doesn't it? ;-)
I am not arguing a C++ programmer is overqualified. I'm saying that we are designing Quants so that 1) it doesn't require a C++ programmer to add a markup dialect, 2) it is no longer the best use of programmer time because it will take that programmer off a number of tasks that users also want done and 3) that a user will always have a better idea about ergonomic aspects of what they use all the time than a developer who rarely touches it.
My other point is that in order to make a superior program you need to involve large numbers of people. Our goal has been to substantially lower the threshold of entry. While your point is valid it is from a perspective of limited user development web development has more developer oriented users than other apps. By my estimates we have hundreds of thousands if not millions of Quanta users. It only takes one person to do some XML to add any markup or scripting language. The arguments you make for XHTML can be made for ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, Java, Python/Zope, Perl, DocBook and numerous XML dialects. One user out of every, say ten thousand, could bring all of this to Quanta... or we could postpone CVS integration, auto doc generation, advanced site planning tools and more for an entire point revision of KDE.
> As I write my webpages in XHTML I need this. But I don't have the time to add it to Quanta since I'm busy developing KMail.
You'll have it and of course I don't expect you to divert from KMail to set it up. You see I want you to keep working on KMail as I'm not up to speed on it so I will make sure XHTML is there. See? this is my prinicple at work. ;-)
> Anyway, thanks for a wonderful program!
You're welcome. I hope soon it is just exactly what you wanted. (Of course as the old American saying goes "if you want something done right you've got to do it yourself" so don't think I won't accept patches if you don't think we get the XHTML support right. ;-))
Cheers
Eric
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Wrenkin on Wednesday 11/Sep/2002, @12:56
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>However my poilitics would surely chase you away
?!?
Look. I like Quanta. I realise its benefits. My political/ethical ideals led me to a GNU/BSD solution. Between Bluefish and Quanta, I chose the one with the features I wanted. That's all there is.
I understand the benefits of OO and abstration, obviously. It's an interpretation of specialisation of labour for an economist-thinking person like me. I understand your concern that i'm just a mooching user, but frankly I'm an HTML hobbyist. I could learn to do what you ask of me, but I have more pressing schoolwork to do.
The only 'time-economical' thing I could do is alert a developer, which I did in my initial posting, though I admitedly chose the wrong forum, and was a little late in doing so.
I'm sorry if I've offended you. I do like Quanta, if it matters for anything. I just don't understand why you're upset. Quanta plain doesn't support the current standard, and I can't adequately aid it in doing so. While it has obvious advantages, they just don't pertain to my needs. Since, structurally, it doesn't take long to support new features, I'll probably be using it in a couple weeks anyways.
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 11/Sep/2002, @14:45
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> >However my poilitics would surely chase you away
> ?!?
It's humor. Relax. What can I say? I am irrepressibly irreverent. ;-)
> I understand the benefits of OO and abstration, obviously. It's an interpretation of specialisation of labour for an economist-thinking person like me. I understand your concern that i'm just a mooching user, but frankly I'm an HTML hobbyist. I could learn to do what you ask of me, but I have more pressing schoolwork to do.
No problem. I understand this posture.
> The only 'time-economical' thing I could do is alert a developer, which I did in my initial posting, though I admitedly chose the wrong forum, and was a little late in doing so.
Nobody's perfect. We knew it was missing though. We just had the same contraints. Not enough time.
> I'm sorry if I've offended you. I do like Quanta, if it matters for anything. I just don't understand why you're upset.
No offense and I'm not upset. I'm simply responding to what you said. Sorry if you took it wrong. Actually you brought up some very good points by way of apparent assumptions. Logically not everyone can be deeply involved in all the things they interface with to the degree that they would be as passionate as I am on this topic. I am deeply involved and I did considerable research and pondered long and hard on our course of action. It's human nature to want to fall into repetative patterns and evaluate things based on comfortable paradigms that may not best serve us. I frequently have to repeat over and over again things like kio means we have all io slaves automatically and such. I expect to have to repeat that Quanta is actually moving toward strong user extensibility and that we need to ask the tiniest percentage of users to step up.
Why should I expect anyone to know that or even to grasp the implications the first time it zings by? The bottom line is that I have to look to introduce this mindset regarding Quanta to the community that throughthis design paradigm shift we can leverage a much larger development effort and provide a richer and more diverse tool.
I apologize if you misinterpreted what I was saying or were any way offended. Your posts were a perfect vehicle to bring out the key points we are addressing. Thanks.
> Since, structurally, it doesn't take long to support new features, I'll probably be using it in a couple weeks anyways.
That'd be my guess. then it's up to our developers and contributing users to convince you that I might have actually had a pretty good idea to make a tool that easily shaped to fit your needs. Who knows? Maybe some day you will actually cheer for a program.
You know, I like you. Have a free copy of Quanta on me. ;-)
Cheers
Eric
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Christoph on Wednesday 11/Sep/2002, @15:22
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And hopefully kate part for 3.2 will have dyn. word wrap, too ;)
(started a branch for that, hope this time it works, think that is now the 6th try or more ;)
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 11/Sep/2002, @15:46
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> And hopefully kate part for 3.2 will have dyn. word wrap, too ;)
>(started a branch for that, hope this time it works, think that is now the 6th try or more ;)
Oh man! What do you want for Christmas dude? Do you have any idea how many emails I get asking for this? I may finally be able to open my email withut saying "not again". ;-) I'm glad this is your baby BTW.
One other cool thing I noted was that Quanta now has code folding in KDE 3.1 beta but I've only seen it work for C++ so far. I'm assuming since we parse our document into nodes currently for our structure tree it may not be too hard to feed that information in and fold... but I haven't had much time to look at the code more than a glance.
Keep up the good work. We'd be buried without you. ;-)
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Re: Get rid of the splash-screen!
by Christoph on Thursday 12/Sep/2002, @14:11
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;) thx
if you want to test the wordwrap stuff, check out kdelibs/kate with TAG: wordwrap
it is binary compatible to the normal kate part HEAD (only added a menu item to enable/disable wordwrap ;)
Would be nice to get it tested out. It still has many bugs (atm it wraps in words, too, but that is just because I was to lazy to change that atm and other bugs are much worser)
Should be ready for 3.2.
About the folding stuff:
The folding is just done by the highlighting xml file. You just must insert there some folding statements to allow to fold contextes, look at the c++ xml file, should be rather easy for php, too ;) Only to fold html we would need some explizite tag lists to fold.
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