KDE 4 Development book

[Frans Englich]

On Friday 12 November 2004 15:04, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> On Friday, 12. November 2004 15:36, Frans Englich wrote:
> > I've done research for this exciting project, and with the help of the
> > authors of Doxygen(Dimitre) and Docbook XSL(Bob, Smith), all technical
> > issues are resolved, AFAICT.
>
> What about the technical problem of editing Docbook sources? I'm not aware 
> of any satisfying open source solution for this problem.

Me neither, although it's a problem we have in either case. What it means in 
broad terms is that the contribution threshold is raised, it have become more 
technically advanced, and that it's easier to break things. I see the 
complexity as a mere requirement of reaching sophistication and working with 
XML technologies.

But I don't worry, I can do all technical work, and in case content to be 
written has to be marked up by someone else(such as me) that's a breeze -- 
the big part is to get stuff written, so let's take one thing at a time..

Back to editors; right, there is a general lack of open source XML editors(but 
many good, cross-platform, proprietary ones), I have some vague memory of 
Quanta though. I guess the solution is to simply write open source ones.. 

If KDE had an W3C XML Schema stack, it would be possible to make Kate _really_ 
good as an XML editor; context-aware completion, datatyping for fields, etc. 
That would at least lead to a pretty much fool-proof _code_ editor, since it 
basically validates on the fly. Any XML format which has a Schema(that is, 
any format needed to be validated..) would gain that functionality.

GUI editors is another matter, since Docbook is semantical markup. However, it 
would be possible to create a GUI XML-editor, which provides widgets 
depending on the Schema.


I subscribe to various W3C lists, and in my eyes, a very clear marketing 
demand is namely GUI editors for XML formats. For example, a news paper has 
an XML format for its articles, which follows through the whole publishing 
chain, but authors can't be demanded to learn XML, and teaching them to not 
use certain functions("don't change the font, please") in their word 
processor works neither; word processors with "restraining templates" is 
needed, and that's more or less identical to the case of editing software for 
Docbook. 

Btw, such functionality would make KWord and similar very attractive, since 
it's such cases open source currently conquers(the Scribus interview gave 
good insights). I should blog..

Another possibility is to tell people to write XHTML Transitional or Strict, 
there is XSLTs which does conversion from those to Docbook pretty well. But 
it can't be overly complicated though. 

But heck, if people are to learn XHTML they can just as well learn Docbook, 
and those who are to write are such technical competent anyway, that they 
probably already know Docbook, or find it easy to learn.


		Frans