I (via my company, GlobalMentor, Inc.) am creating a course for training
developers in Java from the ground up. We have a group of developers
over half-way finished with the course, and soon I will be starting
another group of students in Brazil (where they speak Portuguese).
I personally am writing all the curriculum from scratch. I have chosen
the documentation format to be XHTML5. It is a simple structure, with
only a few CSS classes, but I heavily use semantic HTML5, including
<aside>, <figure>, <code>, <kbd>, <dfn>, etc. I need an editor for me to
finish writing the curriculum. I need the editor to be cross-platform,
and easy enough that my Portuguese translators, who are not developers,
will understand how to use it without corrupting the documents.
My requirements are simple:
* The output is well-formed XML in UTF-8.
* The output maintains the XML element structure.
* The output supports editing of HTML5-specific elements.
* The line endings are correct (CRLF vs LF) for the platform.
* Some sort of editing view that is at least partly WYSIWYG.
You can hardly get any simpler than those requirements. Yet everybody
fails! Everything out there is crap, crap, crap! (This is why I'm
creating the Java developer course to begin with, because most people I
interviewed didn't even know the basics. It seems like most people who
wrote many of these software packages didn't know the basics, either.)
Let's see what's out there:
* BlueGriffin: Very nice WYSIWYG interface with extensive CSS
handling, but is broken:
o When wrapping lines it will sometimes output CRCRLF sequences,
which are invalid on all platforms.
o Within <pre> blocks it doesn't escape < and >, making the output
not well-formed XML.
o The shortcut keys aren't standard at all, and the interface for
remapping them is buggy.
* Brackets: Looks very slick out of the box, and supposedly has a live
preview in Chrome (external), but:
o The gotcha is that the live preview doesn't scroll to match the
cursor if the content is longer than the screen.
o There doesn't even seem to be a preferences/settings dialog
anywhere.
* CoffeeCup HTML Editor: Has a split-screen preview, but:
o There is a bug that has never been fixed, so that the
split-screen preview doesn't scroll with the cursor.
* XXE: Very good at maintaining structure and attributes (if I
remember correctly), but:
o The developers didn't even bother using the correct line endings
for the platform (Java 101)
o I don't know what other issues, because I have been repeatedly
told by XXE support that XXE is not for me, so I haven't
bothered testing further.
I had tried XXE years ago when I didn't have the money to pay a
licensing fee. I seem to remember that its interface was a little clunky
and arcane, but as I've ran out of options I decided to try it again,
with the result indicated above.
Did that answer your question?
Garret Wilson
President
GlobalMentor, Inc.
On 11/29/2015 4:04 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
On 27 Nov 2015, at 22:25, Garret Wilson wrote:
I'm extremely interested in licensing XMLMind.
Perhaps you have said this before (in another thread sometime), but
why are - or were - your interested in the XMLmind editor? What are
the good things that made you consider licensing it?
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