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xml editing features of quanta?
by corey on Thursday 10/Oct/2002, @10:36
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I can't seem to find a straight forward list of features on
the site anywhere. How well does Quanta do as an XML editor?
I do more XML than HTML or PHP or anything like that, and have
been looking for a decent KDE based XML editor. |
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Re: xml editing features of quanta?
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 10/Oct/2002, @13:04
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> I can't seem to find a straight forward list of features on the site anywhere.
That's because I can't keep up with the feature set in any detail and still have any semblance of a life. In fact I often open Quanta from CVS with exclamations of "Wow, I didn't know we had that".
> How well does Quanta do as an XML editor?
Well first off there is also kxmleditor, a tree based XML editor you might look at. Quanta has it's roots in HTML but has been uprooted so to say. We use DTDs. I would have to verify with Andras our current status on our DTD parsing code. As I say, it's difficult to keep up with everything in quanta. Our end objective is to provide full auto-completion from a DTD. Enhanced functionality comes in our definition .rc files and tag files which exist in in their own DTD directory. These files are XML.
Currently we are good for XML but to be very good one needs to do a little bit of XML set up for their dialect and a little point and click. I will list out what you can get for this here. First, by defining your tag files and definition.rc XML file you will get full autocompletion as well as the full function of the structure tree for analyzing and navigating your document. By adding tagxml dialog descriptions you can get full dialog capability for any tag. Using Actions from the configure menu you can assign toolbar actions including a quick tag definition or a script defintion which can use any language that executes in the shell. This is very poweful. You can use this to validate documents or to run visually created dialogs with Kommaander which we will be releasing next week. You can create custom toolbars and even have toolbars associated with your project. In addition the upcoming 3.1 allows you to save groups of files in a project as a veiw to open and close as a group. Project views can include toolbars too.
Beyond this we currently have the XSLT DTD installed and are working to integrate a graphical version of xsldbg into either 3.1 or shortly after. We will be adding tools for XML entities too. We are also working on a pre configured DocBook DTD setup. Quanta has a plugin interface and we intend to have various XML schema validators as plugins shortly, although you can configure plugins as a user as well as program actions too. We think it's better for most users if it's already on the menu.
I don't know if you could say that Quanta is a really good XML editor yet as is. I do know that if you tend to work with a limited number of DTDs right now, with a little work you can make it virtually perfect. Our objective was not to deliver our hard coded idea of what you want so much as to deliver a tool that you could make do exactly what you want first. We hope with community imput from users to flesh out these features into a large number of preconfigured setups.
I hope this helps answer your questions. We have done our best to make sure Quanta can be configured by a user to do any task related to tagging or scripting. Feel free to contact me if I can be of any further help.
Eric Laffoon
Quanta plus project manager
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Re: xml editing features of quanta?
by astor on Friday 11/Oct/2002, @02:15
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This might be totally outside the scope for Quanta, but it would be cool to have an XML editor that supported XML Schemas. An XML Schema is like a DTD, but it it geared towards data entry, so you can say that an element should contain a value between X and Y, and you can give an element help text etc. An XML Schema can be transformed into a data entry hierarchy (like a spreadsheet, but it's a hierarchy). If it would be possible to use Kommander to not only create dialogs, but inline the dialogs into the page (as a kpart?) then it should be possible to "compile" an XML schema using Kommander or something similar into a data entry form! That would be cool!
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Re: xml editing features of quanta?
by Eric Laffoon on Friday 11/Oct/2002, @09:39
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I am familiar with the concept of schemas, though I haven't used them yet. It is currently possible to use various schema validation programs in Quanta using our custom actions. You can also of course write a schema in Quanta. As far as total integration goes we wanted to get DTDs mastered first and then move on to schemas. Also we wanted to look into it more WRT whether we could incorporate exsiting tools as plugins for support or whether we would need to write something ourselves to best integrate this.
As far as integrating Kommander for data entry this is a rather natural thing for it. The mechanics of it should be fairly easy to resolve as a user, but if not let us know. Kommander uses XML ui files which are essentially the QT Designer ui file with custom widgets allowing you to associate text and actions. I don't want to get into detail here. We will be introducing it next week. However it is able to send and receive via stdout and DCOP. Using a language like Perl you can access sockets too. We have on our do list making it produce embeddable parts. This would enable for instance an intranet to embed a tabbed dialog or tree into a frame in konqueror. As far as further interaction and programming it goes the rule with a program like Kommander is that it will end up doing things the designers didn't have the remotest thought of. My use of Kaptain for PHP class dialogs was essentially using a function primarily for test in an unexpected place. So we're quite happy when someone finds a use that we didn't imagine yet.
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