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List:       quanta
Subject:    Re: [Quanta] Autofill title, h1, and filename?
From:       Eric Laffoon <sequitur () kde ! org>
Date:       2005-12-20 3:31:12
Message-ID: 200512191931.12804.sequitur () kde ! org
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On Monday 19 December 2005 6:04 pm, Samir M. Nassar wrote:
> On Monday 19 December 2005 16:38, Eric Laffoon wrote:
> > We don't do WYSIWYG. It's truly fictitious in HTML and besides it's a
> > pain in the ass to type. We call it VPL (Visual Page Layout) which is a
> > more honest term. Anything less than version 3.4 or 3.5 will not be so
> > good and you really should have the same version KDE as Quanta for the
> > KHTML part. It should not be crashing, but if you're running KDE/Quanta
> > 3.3 or especially 3.2 then you should expect crashes.
>
> I really hate to add sour grapes, but VPL has never worked for me without
> crashing. I do not mind because it is not a feature I use, or really intend
> to use since most of my work is in PHP, but whenever I use it is slow,
> crashes fairly often, updates inconsistently.

To be candid I use it very little myself, but that's primarily because I 
consider that it's yet to have certain functionality I require and more 
importantly that I do almost everything in assembled scripted PHP. So really 
without being rather sophisticated it's of nominal use for me. I have used it 
some though and made myself write pages with it. The thing to remember is 
what it has entailed...

Nicolas was rather ambitious when he took it on. BTW some time after he took 
it on I found out he was a 17 year old student. It was a big project for him 
and major props for the work he did, but it was a big learning curve. Leo 
came in and saw inherent design liabilities. Leo works on KHTML, and other 
KHTML developers also had input. They redesigned it in version 3.3 with a new 
caret mode. Primarily this meant it was supposed to finally behave and be 
relatively stable. However while discussing things we wanted to do it became 
obvious what we really needed was Apple's webcore fixes. How many people read 
the Linux news sites flap about KDE developers protesting the way Apple was 
handling things earlier this year? Everything was being returned, but in one 
huge block and it was impossible to extract fixes and separate Apple code. 
Now we have access to their CVS. In fact it's going to be some time to begin 
to integrate all this. Yes, the whole interface in KHTML has to be rewritten 
again.

What I don't think people realize is what a monumental task all this is. If we 
didn't have a piece of code like KHTML we would never even have been able to 
start, but it was not previously equiped to handle this. Right now I have 
developers waiting for KHTML to progress to where they can start rebuilding 
the VPL part, and yes it will be a lot better. However all of this is 
dependent on our advance to KDE 4, because remember the KHTML part is part of 
kdelibs and unless we want to add a huge dependency with massive conflict 
opportunities to our work and huge amounts of reworking you're not going to 
see this for a while.

All I have to go on is what I get in feedback from developers working with VPL 
and testing it as extensively as they can. I can only conclude that perhaps a 
lot of users like me didn't find it to be useful in their style of 
development... or there were just a lot of people not filing bug reports. 
What do you think? Don't worry about offending me here. Think more about my 
being frustrated because I wish I was working from a better data set when I 
tell you it's supposed to be stable. Oops! Sorry. ;-)
>
> If VPL were the main feature of Quanta Plus I would not be a Quanta user to
> be honest. This is sad for me to say since I've been a fan of Quanta, Eric,
> and Andras going back to Quanta Plus 2.2.

If it were substantial for me I'd have forked KHTML and looked for funds to 
sponsor another developer because it would be a massive effort.
>
> Just saying make sure libs are matching is also not a sufficient answer. At
> least not in my case since I am using Quanta 3.5 on KDE 3.5, when I was
> using Quanta 3.4 it was with KDE 3.4. Always the appropriate Quanta
> compiled against the appropriate KDE libs. Even with that, it crashes.

Bug reports? Guys I've had to make a choice. Either I keep spending 20-30 
hours a week on emails with this project and neglect my business, or I walk 
away from all but a minimal involvement for a period of time it takes to 
leverage my business from a nominally adequate income to an immensely 
successful revenue source. I chose to put my income first for a time and I 
believe in the long run the project will benefit as I'm able to put time in 
without financial stress. Even if I did devote the time Quanta is so huge we 
need to develop automated testing because it had things I failed to get 
tested adequately several years ago. I really depend on our core users here 
and those people running alphas, betas, release candidates and SVN.
>
> Hell, just for giggles, I closed the project I was working on, started a
> file from the quickstart button, and went to town with VPL mode, split
> actually since the 'style' toolbar doesn't do jack in VPL pane, after a
> while of playing around, I started cleaning up the tons of <br /> VPL mode
> creates when it should be creating paragraphs, and Quanta eats it.

I had this discussion with Nicolas and he had answers for me in depth that 
made my eyes glaze over. I'd really like more context menus and 
configurablity of the behavior, and we will have that in version 4. Nobody 
wants to work on code now that will be discarded.
>
> No, I won't do a lot of complaining: A- I don't care about VPL personally.
> B- I don't have the C++ skills to offer patches. However, just saying it
> works isn't correct.

Bug reports?
>
> Here is something that is used in WordPress, it is a function converting
> newlies to paragraphs. It might be useful for generating proper paragraphs
> where it generates <br /> now.
>
> http://photomatt.net/scripts/autop
>
> Now I know this will trigger some automatic long email from Eric. (We love
> you Eric) but this isn't some attack on the Quanta team or all the hard
> work. In order to evangelize Quanta Plus to the rest of the non-believers
> features have to work as advertised or evangelists are going to have to
> tack on 'but VPL is broken, don't rely on it for serious work.' and that
> would be the saddest thing I can think of.

Hey I don't care. When Andras and I are working on the new server next week 
and have KNewStuff up send it to me and I'll make it available to all users 
if the license provides. It's easy enough to do in any language though.
-- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org
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