XUL, XBL, JS and DOM

How would you design a Mozilla-based XML editor?

14 Comments


Mozilla supports several XML languages now:

  • XHTML
  • XUL
  • MathML
  • SVG
  • RDF
  • XBL
  • XSLT

All things considered, that’s quite a list. I’m just wondering: how could we build an editor in Mozilla that was flexible enough to switch from one language to another on the fly? (The problem I see is that there are language-specific editors, but not a central application you could add XML language packs to for editing.)
I myself have only a few ideas, but I’d like to hear yours as well

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. If we get a big enough list (complete with people who could code it), I may just start organizing a group of us together to work towards it. I’m talking anything from requirements to UI demos.
I just want to see what community feedback there is, and what we can do to lay some groundwork.
(I hope someone will remind me to ask the MozillaZine admins for a “whiteboard” wiki where I can display ideas you can edit. It would make this easier.)
UPDATE: Through the XUL:IDE page I was referenced to (sarcasm is appreciated 🙂 ), I found a sample for IBM’s compound editor. I didn’t like the fact that you had to do some serious digging to select a XUL element to add… it would be better if they just displayed a menubar specific to XUL when in XUL editing mode.

14 thoughts on “How would you design a Mozilla-based XML editor?”

  1. Why not to extend NVU, if under MPL? Having two different editors seems a bit awkward to me, don’t you?
    (From Alex: N|Vu extensions are certainly a possibility. But N|Vu is heavily oriented towards (X)HTML. Personally, I’d favor a N|Vu-like XHTML language pack for this multilanguage editor.)

  5. I think my ideal XML-language-editor would look much like Mozilla’s “This XML file doesn’t appear to be styled, so here’s the DOM in a clickable list” view – only editable, and with as much IntelliSense-style completion as can be squeezed from whatever DTDs Mozilla knows about. Oh, and a live preview pane for the document wouldn’t go astray. And maybe outliner-style drag-and-drop editing.
    I do like NVu as an (X)HTML editor, but the fact is that the traditional word-processor interface doesn’t map neatly onto a nice hierarchical tag structure, and NVu’s usability suffers as a result. I’m afraid that any attempt at a Nice GUI Editor for any of those other XML dialects would suffer the same malady – so raw text editing is probably the best bet, with as many aids and helpers as you can get.

  6. Think Visual Studio 2005, it supports multiple languages. Then add in some kind of Keyword or <tag> that would define sections of a different language.
    As for a whiteboard – how about the Wiki? There’s a XUL IDE doc there already.

  10. How WYSIWYG could such an editor be? How much functionality would overlap between a WYSIWYG MathML editor and one for SVG?

  11. Well, DTD files seem the obvious choice for language configuration.
    Then just make a nice xml editor out of it.

  14. I don’t think DTDs would be it: They do not support namespaces – something what is really necessary to mix different XML-based languages. So, XML Schema and/or RelaxNG support is needed. As far as I know (as I do not have anything to do with developing Mozilla), the XForms group is working on a XML Schema support.
    I like the idea of this editor, too. Please keep us uptodate about this topic. Thanks.

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