{"id":248,"date":"2008-08-07T07:14:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T07:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=248"},"modified":"2015-01-14T18:35:29","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T18:35:29","slug":"xmetal-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=248","title":{"rendered":"XMetaL Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had been busy doing not one but two authoring environments for XMetaL 5.1<\/span>. I have to say that it’s been a very pleasant experience, in spite for my strong dislike for .NET Studio<\/span>. I’ve criticized JustSystems<\/span> for that before, though, so I won’t go there for the time being. Instead I’ll add my more recent (mostly positive) reflections…<\/p>\n

The scripting\/macro environment is dead easy to use, even for an amateur programmer like me. I’ve created dialogs that change content in various ways while traversing the document tree, I’ve added ID generation code for the my link target elements, I’ve implemented SVG<\/span> viewing capabilities, and more, mostly without cursing. I’ve stopped trying to delegate every programming task to my colleagues, that’s how comfortable I am with it.<\/p>\n

The editor itself is still the best XML editor I know of. If you are a professional (technical) writer there just isn’t anything better available out there. For shorter documents, sure, a text editor will do, or perhaps something like Oxygen<\/span>, but for anything approaching book length, I much prefer a non-geek tool that allows me to focus on content rather than structure when writing, and structure rather than content when editing.<\/p>\n

Found an old bug, though: You can still make XMetaL<\/span> crash by trying to drag & drop a toolbar button on a new toolbar, if that toolbar doesn’t have the “flat look”. I think this one’s been an issue since 2.0<\/span> but I’d have to check my notes to be sure. (Just try exiting the toolbar dialog and KABOOM!<\/span>)<\/p>\n

And finally there’s another little thing bugging me: I have some old XMetaL<\/span> dialogs that I like to use when needed, created using version 2.0<\/span>. XMetaL<\/span> can use them, no problem, but it can’t import them for editing in the new dialog editor. Fairly annoying, in my humble opinion.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had been busy doing not one but two authoring environments for XMetaL 5.1. I have to say that it’s been a very pleasant experience, in spite for my strong dislike for .NET Studio. I’ve criticized JustSystems for that before, though, so I won’t go there for the time being. Instead I’ll add my more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[140,58,145],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}