I think that these comments from holger, which follow the xopus fellow,
are very good. If there is any occasion to review the goals,
supported use cases, and feature sets, please let us know!
I also agree with a lot that lon said, I just do not care that some of
his points are true. And yes, swordfights and bidding war stories need
to stay at home.
Basics
---------
it appears that if I refer to
http://bitflux.ch/editor/behindthescene.html, the workflow bullet
points approach use cases that are NOT in dispute among bitflux
developers. Only the Editor Details are under debate.
Features, Use Cases, and Output
---------------------------------
I know that what I see happening is that we can create XML based on
elements we can define, and these elements get DOMmed and treated with
XSLT. Is this NOT going to happen with bitflux in the future?
I do agree that there may be some duplicate work for anyone trying to
tie bitflux to a CMS, I just think it may be worth it. If I can
succeed in getting bitflux and Bricolage (bricflux?) to play nicely,
then I may be creating very simple XSL docs that will not be in use
anywhere else in my Bricolage/Mason/Apache environment. This may be a
small price to pay for a good input engine.
I want to allow users to assemble and re-order my elements with little
server interaction/latency, and feel like they are rapidly adding
content into workflow.
It is the nature of XML creation that it will get used in many
different ways: various layouts, XSL treatments, CSS treatments, SOAP
and WebDAV too, when you consider the metadata that makes any CMS'd
file whole.
(And hey, lots of sites are a mix of HTML and XHTML, and bad JS
mouseovers, and activeX and applets. Yuck.)
What I want, to allow users to
- pick elements from a menu,
- populate these elements
- re-order or delete elements if necessary
- change element assignment for a data block if applicable
WYSIWYG maybe, enough clues for feedback, definitely
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
None of my use cases needs strict WYSIWYG, just enough context to let
folks know they are proceeding correctly.
If I really want a full blown editor, I will spend the time to
customize Dreamweaver. It will take about as long.
I do not care if folks get to highlight a bunch of text and make it
bold or italic, like wordpad.
If I care about that, then likely I will care a lot about the resulting
code.
- will it be simple html? <b></b>
- a css span? <span
class="make_bold_so_editor_can_review_this_string"></span>
- etc, etc.
What MS and ContentEditable decide is simple markup might not be
correct for my app.
And we all know how much fun HTML output is when it comes from MS
products.
Open Source? Standards? Browsers?
------------------------------------
I think all Open Source allows for is just that. There is no guarantee
of standards adherence, only the chance to pull an oar and have a voice.
example:
lon> All BXE cares about in a schema is the nesting of elements and the
annotation!
me> If that is the entire scope for schema, then good. If there is
something about his approach that will break horribly because of it, or
limit my ability to use BXE for a task, then document it.
On browsers, well now. I will never experience the goodness that is
xopus on my main deck, a Mac OSX laptop. I was a confirmed Netscape
hater now turned Mozilla fan. I say what is the harm in building apps
for Moz only, it could be gtk or deplphi instead, but luckily this
might work on my Mac! Folks do install different software when it
does a good job and it is easy to obtain and use. FTP clients are a
good example. I use Virtual PC. Even if bitflux takes over the world
it will not replace Dreamweaver for many folks.
Anyway, enough from me.
Thanks for bitflux,
Mike
http://bitflux.ch/editor/behindthescene.html
Bitflux Editor Details
• Written completely in Javascript
• Uses XML, XSLT and CSS for rendering
• Independent of Bitflux CMS
• Mozilla, Netscape based => Platform independent, e.g. runs on Mac,
Win, Linux...
• Customization of XML-Tags is easy
• Runs with every backend
Bitflux Editor Workflow
• CMS delivers XML, XSLT, CSS and Schema (in JS)
• User edits Text
• Editor delivers new XML back to the CMS
• Extraction of Information out of the XML Document is the task of the
CMS
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