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List:       quanta-devel
Subject:    Re: [quanta-devel] my tool would be like this...
From:       Paulo Moura Guedes <moura () kdewebdev ! org>
Date:       2005-04-08 4:27:00
Message-ID: 200504080527.00505.moura () kdewebdev ! org
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On Thursday 07 April 2005 12:29, Jens Herden wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wiping the floor and this was an creative time :-)
>
> Inspired from the discussion about VPL I was thinking about my personal
> best tool for the manipulation of HTML/XML and I made a quick drawing to
> show you what was in my mind.
>
> First of all I want to stress that I don't believe that a texteditor
> interface is good for web design. A lot of people are used to it, but that
> is only one side of the coin. I would like to have something that combines
> the tree features with the text editor features. For me it is not important
> that what I see is close to the result, therefore I have a preview. And if
> we could make a live preview that refreshes automaticly, like VPL does, I
> would be happy.
>
> Please look at the attached PDF before reading further.
>
> The ideas are:
> - one block for each block tag
> - one color for one tag
> - fold and unfold of block with the +/- in the top left corner
> - hovering a block would give a tooltip with the attributes
> - a click on a block would select it
> - a block can be copied and pasted
> - a block can be dragged and dropped
> - a double click would open the attribute editor
> - the textblocks are inline editable after a double click
>
> There are a lot of questions not answered yet:
> - how to handle inline tags? They should be displayed and reflected in the
> font (e.g. <strong>) somehow
> - how to connect this to CSS?
>
> Can you follow? What do you think about it?

Interesting idea, it's a kind of WYSIWYMean. It's more visual than a simple 
tree bit it keeps power and control.
You didn't mention how to create nodes but I think it would be cool that they 
could be dragged from the toolbar.
I think inline nodes should be treated has mozilla composer does in the "HTML 
Tags" mode, i.e., showing a little box with the name of the tag before his 
text child node begins, and the style would be manipulated in two ways: using 
direct HTML or in an external (CSS) stylesheet, by clicking on the tag name 
box. 
I don't know if it's feasible to show the style of inline text nodes and the 
arrangement of elements after been processed by CSS, at least I don't know 
how. Displaying just plain text would be enough (what about images...)?
BTW, how to implement this? :) Maybe we need to have our own canvas where we 
would draw the block node structure and insert KHTML render fragments inside 
the block nodes scope (in case we didn't have just plain text)? This is a 
little crazy I know :)

So, this approach has the advantage of easy manipulating the structure and 
having a more intuitive display, but at the same time is difficult to imagine 
how the document will display. It would be a complement view, as we also need 
things like dragging absolute positioned div elements and resizing images. 

I would say this is kind of a merge between the kafka part and the document 
structure. It's hard for me as a user to imagine how good such a tool could 
be but I would like to further discuss this ideas. I think we're heading in 
the right way and will take good conclusions out of all this.
-- 
Paulo Moura Guedes

http://caixamagica.org
http://kdewebdev.org
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