Archive for the ‘Editor’ Category

BaseX. The XML Database. [XPath/XQuery]

Friday, December 21st, 2012

BaseX. The XML Database.

From the webpage:

News: BaseX 7.5 has just been released…

BaseX is a very light-weight, high-performance and scalable XML Database engine and XPath/XQuery 3.0 Processor, including full support for the W3C Update and Full Text extensions. An interactive and user-friendly GUI frontend gives you great insight into your XML documents.

Another XML editor but I mention it for its support of XQuery more than as an editor per se.

We continue to lack a standard query language for topic maps and experience with XQuery may prove informative.

Not to mention its possible role in gathering diverse data for presentation in a merged state to users.

Posted in Editor, XML, XQuery | No Comments »

<ANGLES>

Friday, December 21st, 2012

<ANGLES>

From the homepage:

ANGLES is a research project aimed at developing a lightweight, online XML editor tuned to the needs of the scholarly text encoding community. By combining the model of intensive code development (the “code sprint”) with participatory design exercises, testing, and feedback from domain experts gathered at disciplinary conferences, ANGLES will contribute not only a working prototype of a new software tool but also another model for tool building in the digital humanities (the “community roadshow”).

Work on ANGLES began in November 2012.

We’ll have something to share very soon!

<ANGLES> is an extension of ACE:

ACE is an embeddable code editor written in JavaScript. It matches the features and performance of native editors such as Sublime, Vim and TextMate. It can be easily embedded in any web page and JavaScript application. ACE is maintained as the primary editor for Cloud9 IDE and is the successor of the Mozilla Skywriter (Bespin) project.

<ANGLES> code at Sourceforge.

I will be interested to see how ACE is extended. Just glancing at it this morning, it appears to be the traditional “display angle bang syntax” editor we all know so well.

What puzzles me is that we have been to the mountain of teaching users to be comfortable with raw XML markup and the results have not been promising.

As opposed to the experience with OpenOffice, MS Office, etc., which have proven that creating documents that are then expressed in XML, is within the range of ordinary users.

<ANGLES> looks like an interesting project but whether it brings XML editing within the reach of ordinary users is an open question.

If the XML editing puzzle is solved, perhaps it will have lessons for topic map editors.

Posted in Editor, Software, XML | No Comments »

Collaborating, Online with LaTeX?

Sunday, December 16th, 2012

I saw a tweet tonight that mentioned two online collaborative editors based on LaTeX:

writeLaTeX

and,

ShareLaTeX

I don’t have the time to look closely at them tonight but thought you would find them interesting.

If collaborative editing is possible for LaTeX, shouldn’t that also be possible for a topic map?

I saw this mentioned in a tweet by Jan-Piet Mens

Posted in Authoring Topic Maps, Collaboration, Editor | No Comments »

Behind the Mirror

Saturday, November 10th, 2012

Behind the Mirror by Chris Granger.

Summary:

Chris Granger discusses the need for enhancing the learning tools starting from his own experience watching through a mirror people trying to solve problems at Microsoft.

A compelling presentation about principles for IDEs via TECO, through Visual Studio and ending up with Clojure.

Chris argues we should be able to hide, foreground and manipulate abstractions as part of an IDE.

I see potential for interactive topic map authoring where the state of the map only a round trip to the server behind the user.

Posted in Clojure, Editor | No Comments »

Emacs Rocks!

Sunday, October 7th, 2012

Emacs Rocks!

A series of very short (first one I saw was 1 minute, 54 seconds) screen casts of using Emacs.

A communication model to be emulated!

I first saw this at Christophe Lalanne’s A bag of tweets / September 2012

Posted in Editor | No Comments »

A Pluggable XML Editor

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

A Pluggable XML Editor by Grant Vergottini.

From the post:

Ever since I announced my HTML5-based XML editor, I’ve been getting all sorts of requests for a variety of implementations. While the focus has been, and continues to be, providing an Akoma Ntoso based legislative editor, I’ve realized that the interest in a web-based XML editor extends well beyond Akoma Ntoso and even legislative editors.

So… with that in mind I’ve started making some serious architectural changes to the base editor. From the get-go, my intent had been for the editor to be “pluggable” although I hadn’t totally thought it through. By “pluggable” I mean capable of allowing different information models to be used. I’m actually taking the model a bit further to allow modules to be built that can provide optional functionality to the base editor. What this means is that if you have a different document information model, and it is capable of being round-tripped in some way with an editing view, then I can probably adapt it to the editor.

Let’s talk about the round-tripping problem for a moment. In the other XML editors I have worked with, the XML model has had to quite closely match the editing view that one works with. So you’re literally authoring the document using that information model. Think about HTML (or XHTML for an XML perspective). The arrangement of the tags pretty much exactly represents how you think of an deal with the components of the document. Paragraphs, headings, tables, images, etc, are all pretty much laid out how you would author them. This is the ideal situation as it makes building the editor quite straight-forward.

Note the line:

What this means is that if you have a different document information model, and it is capable of being round-tripped in some way with an editing view, then I can probably adapt it to the editor.

I think that means that we don’t all have to use the same editing view and at the same time, we can share an underlying format. Or perhaps even annotate texts with subject identities, not even realizing we are helping others.

This is an impressive bit of work and as the post promises, there is more to follow.

(I first saw this at Legal Informatics. http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/vergottini-on-improvements-to-akneditor-html-5-based-xml-editor-for-legislation/)

Posted in Editor, XML | No Comments »

Building a Web-Based Legislative Editor

Saturday, May 5th, 2012

Building a Web-Based Legislative Editor by Grant Vergottini.

From the post:

I built the legislative drafting tool used by the Office of the Legislative Counsel in California. It was a long and arduous process and took several years to complete. Issues like redlining, page & line numbers, and the complexities of tables really turned an effort that, while looking quite simple at the surface, into a very difficult task. We used XMetaL as the base tool and customized it from there, developing what has to be the most sophisticated implementation of XMetaL out there. We even had to have a special API added to XMetaL to allow us to drive the change tracking mechanism to support the very specialized redlining needs one finds in legislation.
…
…With HTML5, it is now possible to build a full fledged browser-based legislative editor. For the past few months I have been building a prototype legislative editor in HTML5 that uses Akoma Ntoso as its XML schema. The results have been most gratifying. Certainly, building such an editor is no easy task. Having been working in this subject for 10 years now I have all the issues well internalized and can navigate the difficulties that arise. But I have come a long way towards achieving the holy grail of legislative editors – a web-based, standards-based, browser-neutral solution.

Not even out in beta, yet, but a promising report from someone who knows the ends and outs of legislation editors.

Why is that relevant for topic maps?

A web-based editor could, not necessarily will, lead to custom editors that are configured for work flows in the production of topic map work products.

If you think about it, we interact with work flows based on our recognition of subjects and taking actions based on the subjects we recognize.

Not a big step for software to record which subjects we have recognized, while our machinery silently adds identifiers, updates indexes of associations and performs other tasks.

PS: I originally saw this mentioned at the Legal Informatics blog.

Posted in Editor, Law | No Comments »