making browsing and data entry easier
Posted: Wed Aug 25, 2004 3:02 am
Dear oXygen people:
I have been an oXygen user/subscriber for almost two years, and I am largely happy with the product overall. However, I do not need most of the features you have added in the last two years, and I'm continually surprised when each update fails to provide what I (and many other users) need: namely, simple and efficient ways to browse XML documents and enter XML-based data.
XML is hard to read and, to understand it, you need to be able to see as much of the XML document at a time. I thought that your Tree Editor would help, and to some extent, it does. However, I would appreciate seeing improvements that would make the Tree Editor more efficient in its use of space. For example, to display an element with a value and one attribute takes three lines. It would be great if you could have a mode that enables you to see this data or, more realistically, part of this data in one line, perhaps something like this:
paragraph text-type = "plain" "In this section, we cover..."
where paragraph is the element, text-type is its attribute, and its content is a paragraph of text that begins with "In this section we cover". Another way to enable the main oXygen editor to show more data is to enable the editor to do "code folding"--that is, to let the editor hide or show an entire element with a single mouse click.
I would also appreciate anything that you can come up with to make it easier to add "records" of data that are destined to be expressed in an XML format. Even a simple form that makes it quick and easy to enter successive "records" of data, which then are output as XML as a series of property/value pairs would help--I could then use XSLT to transform that into the XML the that I need.
Please feel free to contact me if you like more details. Thanks for listening.
I have been an oXygen user/subscriber for almost two years, and I am largely happy with the product overall. However, I do not need most of the features you have added in the last two years, and I'm continually surprised when each update fails to provide what I (and many other users) need: namely, simple and efficient ways to browse XML documents and enter XML-based data.
XML is hard to read and, to understand it, you need to be able to see as much of the XML document at a time. I thought that your Tree Editor would help, and to some extent, it does. However, I would appreciate seeing improvements that would make the Tree Editor more efficient in its use of space. For example, to display an element with a value and one attribute takes three lines. It would be great if you could have a mode that enables you to see this data or, more realistically, part of this data in one line, perhaps something like this:
paragraph text-type = "plain" "In this section, we cover..."
where paragraph is the element, text-type is its attribute, and its content is a paragraph of text that begins with "In this section we cover". Another way to enable the main oXygen editor to show more data is to enable the editor to do "code folding"--that is, to let the editor hide or show an entire element with a single mouse click.
I would also appreciate anything that you can come up with to make it easier to add "records" of data that are destined to be expressed in an XML format. Even a simple form that makes it quick and easy to enter successive "records" of data, which then are output as XML as a series of property/value pairs would help--I could then use XSLT to transform that into the XML the that I need.
Please feel free to contact me if you like more details. Thanks for listening.
