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WYSIWYG Rant

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<rant>
How come a web-based XML editor can call itself a “WYSIWYG editor”? WYSIWYG, per definition, stands for What You See Is What You get, but that’s just madness in this context, for several reasons:

First of all, XML is supposed to be about semantics and structure, not about contents and presentation. The idea is that you present your XML according to your media. On paper, a certain layout is desired, with page numbers, page references, and so on. Online, you need hyperlinks, sans serif fonts, and so on. On a mobile phone’s two-inch screen, you need to break down yur information to short chunks with short titles and captins. And so on.

Furthermore, different web browsers will display a web page differently. A page displayed using Internet Explorer will not be identical to the the same page in Firefox. Sure, they are close these days, but not the same.

And finally, when displaying XML in something other than a pure text editor, you apply a stylesheet of some kind. CSS is common; XMetaL uses it, as does Oxygen. Web-based XML editors often use a combination of XSLT and CSS, so two stylesheets, not one.

Isn’t this the exact opposite of WYSIWYG? You get further away from what XML actually looks like while not getting closer to the published result.

WYSIWYG, in the context of XML and structured documentation, is in my humble opinion a marketing ploy by companies that seem to have little else to offer.
</rant>

XMetaL Revisited

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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 recent (mostly positive) reflections…

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 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.

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, 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.

Found an old bug, though: You can still make XMetaL 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 but I’d have to check my notes to be sure. (Just try exiting the toolbar dialog and KABOOM!)

And finally there’s another little thing bugging me: I have some old XMetaL dialogs that I like to use when needed, created using version 2.0. XMetaL can use them, no problem, but it can’t import them for editing in the new dialog editor. Fairly annoying, in my humble opinion.

Oxygen 9.0 Is Out

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Version 9.0 of my favourite XSL IDE, Oxygen, was released yesterday. Of course, I downloaded and installed it as soon as I could, having waited for an upgrade since 8.2 came out, some six months ago. I’ve written about Oxygen before; it’s the first decent XSL IDE available for Linux, and the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve come to depend on it. See, what I especially like is the fact that I no longer need Microsoft Windows to do my XML/XSL work. Oxygen works very well in Debian/GNU Linux.

And now, it looks like I can finally re-evaluate my XML editor needs, too. So far, I’ve run XMetaL in wine, which kind of works except that right-clicking the workspace still crashes the program (but that’s fairly OK since I seldom need to right-click anything while writing). As most things in wine, it’s beta quality, no more.

Now, however, Oxygen 9.0 comes with a semi-WYSIWYG view, with CSS formatting and start- and end tag symbols, making it the first real alternative to running Windows software in wine. It is reasonably fast, too, from what I’ve seen so far, and certainly more stable than anything run in wine. You do need an official Sun Java JRE, though; it will complain if you use some of the Java replacements available for Linux, and it doesn’t work with the GNU libgcj Java Virtual Machine.

I’ll give it a more thorough test run within the next week or so, but I’m hoping that it can deliver what it promises.

Long Time No Blog

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Anyone missed me? Don’t lie; you didn’t. It’s the Internet and there are a gazillion blogs out there. Some of them are probably even better than mine.

I’m back now, though, and I will once again be offering my views on things that matter to me on this space. Hope you’ll read.

XMetaL 5

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I’ve spent the last few days tinkering with an XMetaL authoring environment for a client. The XMetaL version is the latest, 5.0, which is actually a lot of fun, but unfortunately it means that I’ve been forced back to Windows. What’s worse, it also means that I’m forced to develop in Microsoft’s exceedingly bloated Visual Studio .Net, surely a punishment for a previous life.

It’s beyond me to understand why JustSystems, the Japanese company that bought XMetaL from Blast Radius, insists on this dependency.

An XMetaL developer doesn’t need all the bells, whistles, and bugs that is Visual Studio, he needs a reasonably flexible scripting environment, easy access to modifying CSS stylesheets, writing (XML-based) toolbars and customizations, as well as the occasional form or dialog.

The thing is, different developers have different preferences. While I do believe that there are people that actually like Visual Studio .Net, not all of us do. Maybe we prefer other languages, or maybe we believe that forcing us to use the same tool for everything just isn’t the right way to go. After all, even if you own an 18-wheel truck, you don’t use it to drive to the supermarket to buy groceries. You use a car or a bus or a bike. Something that doesn’t get in the way.

Because that’s what Visual Studio does. It gets in the way, and more so when all you want to do is to tweak a CSS stylesheet. And I haven’t even mentioned how hard it has become to change the DTD and then recompile it and import it into your project.

And I won’t, because my blood pressure is important to me.

So while XMetaL in its latest reincarnation is very nice, I still consider version 3.1 to be superior for a number of reasons, of which one important one (to me) is that I can run it in and wine and Linux.

Oxygen

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Yesterday, I finally gave in and bought Oxygen, a Java-based XML/XSL editor available for Linux. While it’s not an editor I’d choose for authoring XML documents (I still prefer something like XMetaL for anything beyond a page or two), I’ve fallen in love with it while writing XSL stylesheets for Arabic/Persian/Hebrew output for a client.

Until now, I’ve used ActiveState’s Komodo for the purpose but I have to admit that Oxygen is better. Obviously, there’s content completion for XSLT, but also for XSL-FO, which is very nice. You can also set a DTD or XML Schema of your own choice as the target output, which makes it a lot easier and faster to write stylesheets.

But the best feature is one that I don’t really expect to use commercially: Oxygen‘s got Relax NG support, both for writing Relax NG schemas and for writing instances. It’s really cool, but unfortunately, nobody seems to use Relax NG. It’s just me and a few mates.

And no, I’m not affiliated with the company behind Oxygen in any way. I just like the product. A lot.

Global Warming for Gore?

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This is the Oscars weekend, and one of the nominated films is The Inconvenient Truth It’s now speculated that an Oscar could be his first step towards the White House., former US Vice-President Al Gore’s eye opener on global warming and the climate crisis threatening us all. The dramatically inclined even suggest that he could announce his candidacy on the podium, Oscar in hand.

I think it’s a great idea. Gore would probably be the best candidate in years, if he runs, a candidate with an agenda as important to the resat of the world as for the US. In his words (with diagrams of water flooding Manhattan in the background), is it possible that we should focus on other dangers than just terrorism?

KDE CD Player Woes

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Until recently, I’ve been using kscd as my CD player in the KDE desktop environment. Some time ago, however, kscd caught a bug. After a few minutes’ worth of playing a newly inserted CD, the CD stops and resets to track 1. If I press Play again, it will now play the CD flawlessly, from start to end. However, if I eject it and insert a new CD, the bug reappears.

This has been driving me nuts.

After some unsuccessful Googling, where I did find others sharing the same problem with me but no solution, I listened to a friend’s advise and switched to Amarok, a media player that handles MP3s, fetches lyrics, builds playlists and helps me compile them in a MySQL database, among other things. Amarok is really nice.

But the kscd bug bothers me, and I want it solved. If anyone out there reads this and knows what happens, and why, please leave a note.

Microsoft Vista Praise Could Go Here

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It seems that Microsoft is giving away brand-new Acer Ferrari laptops as Christmas gifts to some bloggers out there. These people have apparently been praising the upcoming Microsoft Vista operating system in particularly clever (and objective, I’m sure) ways, and so now get their rewards.

If you haven’t had the chance to drool over an Acer Ferrari yet, have a look and tell me that you don’t want one.

Look, Mr Gates, I know I wrote a little something about the Vista EULA some time ago, and I know I’ve been blogging about Linux every now and then, but is it really too late for atonement? Perhaps I could write some positive words about the XML-based new layout format you hope to backstab, I mean, replace, PDF with, or maybe I could join the MS choir about the benefits of the Office XML format? Or I could just write a blog about the Microsoft-Novell agreement where you hope to short-circuit the open source market?

Call me.