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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Andras Mantia on Wednesday 20/Apr/2005, @02:35
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> IMHO web developers need a generic XML editor that can:
Quanta as well as Kate XML Tools tries to be a generic XML editor.
> 1. validate documents using *any* DTD or XML Schema.
It can do it with the help of xmlval.kmdr (a Kommander script) included with Quanta and present already on the DocBook toolbars. Of course you can use in other cases as well. And of course with a well written DTEP you get on-the-fly validation with the help of the structure tree and the problems view.
> 2. suggest and autocomplete tags.
It does that.
> 3. create instances of documents from a schema
This is missing.
> KDE currently lacks such an XML editor.
>I don't like the "tag soup" approach of Quanta. It feels like a relic from the > past.
What do you mean about "tag soup" approach?? If you mean the .tag description files, we need it otherwise how would we know about tag, attributes and the relation between tags? And you don't have to write those tag files by hand (but you can and are suggested to fine tune them), but use the DTD->DTEP convertion dialog. Schema->DTEP conversion is not possible yet, but if you have a Schema->DTD converting application, you can do this in 2 steps.
Sorry, but aside of point 3 you are spreading wrong information.
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Flavio on Wednesday 20/Apr/2005, @04:07
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hi andreas,
you are certainly right about quanta features. I'm sorry about any false statement :(
Anyway the validation feature is too hidden and complicated, if you think this is the *most useful* feature for a web developer. By "tag soup" I mean that quanta seems designed to produce old style invalid html. It should not even let you save a document that does not validate.
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Andras Mantia on Wednesday 20/Apr/2005, @04:11
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I agree that it may be hidden. Regarding what it produces: it produces whatever you write. ;-) And what is in the .tag files. I don't say that they have all valid tag descriptions, but unless someone notices us about an invalid tag generation we cannot fix as they are just too many tags (DTEP packages) shipped with Quanta.
And altough you can say it's even more hidden it is possible to configure Quanta to check the validity on save/on load/whenever you want with the help of Event Actions.
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen on Wednesday 20/Apr/2005, @04:55
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Not let you save an invalid document? I'm sorry, but that doesn't work in the real world ;) Have you ever tried programming a site that has to work in all the different browsers, including that nasty excuse for one Internet Explorer? There's no way of doing advanced designs and have it work in all of them at the same time without some nasty, non-standard IE conditionals. I would very much not like for Quanta+ to enforce that on me. A box explaining that it's non-standard, with that Don't Show Again checkbox we know so well, would work ok for me for this, but forcing it on the user, that's a very non-KDE way of thinking ;)
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Jonathan Dietrich on Wednesday 20/Apr/2005, @16:45
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Hogwash! Please check http://csszengarden.com/ and learn how to code to standards. It features a single clean xhtml page (no presentation, no tables, images, etc. ) that is entirely styled by css. Choosing a different design from the menu on the left simply changes the css. This shows the true power of css. Using this technique also makes lynx users happy.
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 20/Apr/2005, @10:04
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Andras didn't mention but Quanta also enables real time structural validation for any DTD if you open the structure tree while editing. As far as Schema validation goes, our initial attempt at reading DTDs was to go with a Schema reading and DTD to Schema conversion. Our preference was to make Schema, not DTD, the basis of our internal validation. The problem is this... suggest to me a mature and functional library for this that we can access and our users can freely access. The tool must be able to handle all scenarios and operate on a diverse set of frameworks for whatever a user's Schema requirements are. If you know where to turn on this let me know. Everything we found was incomplete, often huge and not very versatile. In fact writing Schema tools for targetted use means deciding what your requirements are and picking a library based on that. I was frankly very dissappointed. Schema holds a wonderful promise but as far as I can tell it is not being realized today because it is splintered into divergent ideas and nobody has produced clean universal libraries. Writing the whole library is not practical, especially as when we looked XML Schema was nowhere near set in stone.
As for your other observation, what version are you running? I noted that into 3.1 and 3.2 our default toolbars reflected old style HTML. That changed in 3.3, but it's still academic as we develop those toolbars with user tools in the interface. All of Quanta has been designed to be completely user extensible... so saying what it is in this regard is reflecting the influence of commercial packaged software to be lazy because when you have it running it's pretty much at it's limits of what can be done with it. Quanta will never reach these limits as most of it's personality is developed at run time.
As far as enforcing validation on save... you can set Quanta up to do this easily with Project Event Actions. We will _never_ force this on you because I think it's fascist and because there are clear and valid reasons I know it will flood us with bug reports.
The big problem a lot of people have with Quanta is that it is "not finished" in the way they would like. If we take all those issues and put them on the wall how many "ways" will we find Quanta should be like? Nearly as many as there are people using it. The potential uses for Quanta are too diverse and given the tools available we have to fill a wide spectrum of uses. The only way such highly personal software can be perfect for you is if you customize it to your perfect ideal. If we do it we will have multiple custom configurations and you will probably still not like one.
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by devil advocate on Thursday 21/Apr/2005, @08:01
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"It should not even let you save a document that does not validate."
There is an old saying about unix: "it doesn't try to avoid you making silly things, for if it did, they it would avoid you doing smart things too".
Who do you thing is Lafoon (to name one) to know about YOUR requirements? The program, of course should *suggest* and make proper way to be the easy way, but anything out of this would be stupid ingerence.
Still, you can try Windows: there you surely will find the "This Way Is The One And Only Way" approach.
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Frans Englich on Thursday 28/Apr/2005, @13:04
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Adding my two cents here;
What from my perspective would be the perfect solution for this is rigging up the DOM 3 Validation interfaces,[1] which is built for editing Documents while having validness introspection. A large advantage is that it is abstracted from a particular schema language, and allows DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, or any other schema language to be used under the same roof. Here's a quote from its Introduction:
'This module provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to guide construction and editing of XML documents. Examples of such guided editing are queries like those that combine questions like "what does the schema allow me to insert/delete here" and "if I insert/delete here, will the document still be valid."'
KDE is badly missing a Schema implementation; an implementation which should be generic and not tied to Quanta or any other particular application. Quanta needs it for editing documents, and all "next-generation" XML stuff need it for data typing in the XPath data model. In other words, XQuery, XPath 2.0, XSL-T 2.0 all requires a Schema stack.
Are you up for the task?
All it requires is a bit of C++ knowledge, an interest for XML technologies, and to be the one for bringing KDE to the next generation of XML.
The stack should likely be written against KDOM, kdenonbeta/kdom. There's a design/info doc found at kdenonbeta/kdom/docs/readme.xhtml[2], and folks at #ksvg can help with KDOM specifics. KDOM has everything from XML Catalogs to DOM 3 Load-and-Save, so it is a good base to build upon.
Cheers,
Frans
1.
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Val/
2
http://webcvs.kde.org/*checkout*/kdenonbeta/kdom/docs/readme.xhtml
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Re: Quanta is useless for me
by Martin Honermeyer on Wednesday 06/Jul/2005, @04:20
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Great, that's the way! Did anyone already engage in this?
Martin
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