Re: rendering PCDATA in xml documents

On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 17:08, Eric Chastan wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> Josh, I don't understand why you said that it's not the job of an xml
> editor to handle PCDATA. I think that it is important for such tool to
> render all text with a friendly layout because a lot of xml files a
> quiet obscure to read and a good layout helps a lot.
> It is true that in my mail I spoke only about "code" but it in fact it
> could be every kind of text. 
> I think that nxlm is really better than psgml and with the ability to
> render the full text in a pretty way it could be even better.

If you've got an XML file containing JavaScript, it seems like a very
reasonable to want to be able to use the facilities of javascript mode
to edit the embedded JavaScript, and similarly for other kinds of PCDATA
which have a specialized mode.

> You spoke about mmm-mode did you really try it? mmm-mode is a good
> tool but it has a lot of drawbacks, one of them is that mmm-mode used
> overlays intensively and this leads to problem when there is are a lot
> of embedded sections.

I haven't yet tried mmm-mode.

I can see a couple of problems with making a general purpose mode work
for XML:

a) I want to be able to specify which mode is used for PCDATA at the XML
level rather than in terms of regexes in the buffer. For example, I want
to be able to specify that the content of an element with a specific
namespace URI and local name should use a particular mode.

b) I don't want to be forced to use CDATA sections.  I want Emacs to
understand that the JavaScript code isn't simply a substring of the XML
buffer, but rather a substring of the buffer after substitution of
character/entity references.  This seems not so easy.  Perhaps you could
have a separate, temporary buffer for each PCDATA fragment, which would
use the appropriate mode for that fragment. You would arrange you could
edit either the XML or the temporary buffer and the temporary buffer
would always be equal to the result of replacing character/entity
references in the corresponding fragment of XML.  Then you would have a
command in XML mode to switch to the temporary buffer, and I guess a
minor mode in the temporary buffer to maintain synchronization with the
XML and to provide a command to switch back to the XML.  Does mmm-mode
deal with the escaping issue?

What kind of UI would people like to see for dealing with embedded
PCDATA which has its own Emacs major mode?

James
-- 
To send me mail, replace auth-only by public in the from address. 



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