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List:       quanta-devel
Subject:    Re: [quanta-devel] Quanta+ for KDE 4 - GSOC
From:       Niko Sams <niko.sams () gmail ! com>
Date:       2010-02-25 11:59:23
Message-ID: 629542d41002250359g21f2daa8rc4b279f699bf5a8d () mail ! gmail ! com
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2010/2/25 Andras Mantia <amantia@kde.org>:
> Hi (again)!
>
>  I will list some of the key points in Quanta that I think made it
> either unique (at that time) and powerful. As I told on IRC, of course,
> the one who codes decides which is more important for him (you) and
> which is more fun to work on.
> 1) First of all, custom XML support. I used Quanta to write different
> kind of XMLs, like the KDE feature page, XMLGUI, Quanta's own language
> definition types, etc. The abbility to load the DTD (or some other kind
> of definition file) for an XML varianta and get basic features, like
> autocompletion, document tree, validation and error reporting, tag
> editing, was very useful. Kate has some kind of XML support, at least in
> KDE3 times it had autocompletion, but wasn't that powerful.
> Unfortunately HTML!=XML, so there were some HTML specific code, but it
> can be done in a way, that you focus on XML and add the strange features
> of html (like possibility to ommit closing tags) later.
>
> 2) Autocompletion that is context aware, so it won't just blindly show
> all the XML tags, but only those that are valid at that point.
>
> 3) document tree overview and error reporting. Related to 2 and at least
> in Quanta3 they were basicaly the same functionality with a different
> view. Document tree helps a lot to overview the structure of your
> document and spot problems, like missing closing tags. The error
> reporting just helped and shown the same problems in a different
> toolview.
My opinion on this: Quanta is an Web development IDE, top priority should be
HTML support.
With proper DTD support we get XML for free anyway.

> 4) Custom toolbars and actions. I know you mentioned like something you
> would not use, but I think it is  very powerful and usable also in other
> parts of KDevelop. This was kind'a working and mostly Quanta indepent,
> when I stopped to work on Quanta, but of course KDevelop changed a lot
> meantime. The idea is that you can create actions (that can be
> integrated functionality, external scripts, etc.) and you can organize
> them in toolbars, and of course assign shortcuts to it. The benefit is:
> easier to extend Quanta (both for the user and the developer for the
> next version), actions/toolbars can be shared, easy to create useful
> toolbar packages for different XML languages. Check the Quanta3 docs
> about what they are, how they worked. So they were not only to introduce
> simple text, but were much more. E.g code formatting or running
> htmltidy, xmllint, even showing the page in an external browser was
> implemented with the help of the action. You could eg. run an external
> script to process the selected text and replace with something else.
I think this should be integrated with snippets. Like shortcuts to
snippets, add them to
a toolbar, operate on selection, scripted snippets...

> 5) HTML preview. I mean, not WYSIWYG, but just showing the current
> content of the document. If that is in a different view, and updates on-
> the-fly(of course with a delay), even better. So the editing is still in
> code, you just get feedback how it would look. With PHP of course the
> code needs to go through a preprocessor, like a web server (this was
> supported by Quanta3).
sounds useful. Maybe integrated with a browser launcher so it could be used
for debugging too.

> 6) This feature was unique, but underutilized: event actions. Related to
> 4) you could assign actions to certain events, like opening the project,
> saving the file, opening a file, etc. A good idea IMO and not XML/HTML
> development related. Check the Quanta3 docs for a detailed description.
Never used that, low priority imho.

Niko
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