Lots of little things since my last update:

• Source code editing (with some serious bugs for XML)
• Minimal support for editing text documents
• Saving documents Verbosio is editing
• Using Verbosio to launch another copy of Verbosio

What does the last item mean? Think of software applications as objects (like fruits). Verbosio is an application (let’s say a pear). Currently, when you run make-project.pl for Verbosio, you don’t get one copy of Verbosio; you get two. (Cloning digital pears is cheap.) The first copy is the “default” copy, and uses the “default” profile. The second copy is a “testing” copy, using a “testing” profile. The default copy can open the testing copy.

Why would I want you to do this?

Verbosio’s design is for a very scalable XML editor. Verbosio itself is mostly written in XUL (a XML language), XBL (another XML language), and JavaScript. So out of the box, Verbosio has strong potential to edit two of its three major language components. The third, JavaScript, Verbosio will also support editing. JavaScript is an integral technology for the WWW and for Gecko-based products and extensions in particular. Editing JS in Verbosio would eliminate another barrier for using Verbosio in the real (virtual) world – and move Verbosio closer to a “dogfood” status.

Alas, I’m not there yet. I knew instinctively that mozilla.org’s XMLSerializer (which I do use a bit) wouldn’t produce exactly the same document as what the user put in.

Case in point, these days I usually write my XML markup like this:

<vbox>
<textbox id="myTextBox"
multiline="true"
rows="20"
cols="15"
/>
</vbox>

Your way of writing XML will probably differ greatly. However, Verbosio currently treats this as:

<vbox>
<textbox id="myTextBox" multiline="true" rows="20" cols="15"/>
</vbox>

It might be technically accurate, but it enforces its own code style on the user. That’s really annoying, especially when you have to deal with a version control system like CVS or Subversion

. I also have issues with expanded entities in <!DOCTYPE > tags.

So I’m going to make a special request now. I’d like people to comment to this blog entry with different examples of XML source code conventions. I need test documents, so I can write a “preserve source formatting” functionality for Verbosio. Please paste links to the examples; don’t put the examples in-line. Please also make sure for longer examples that they are internally consistent (and as different from other posted examples as feasible). I’d really appreciate some basic “litmus tests” for this.

In the meantime, I’m going to work on other easy-fix items for Verbosio, such as closing a document, and on some larger-scale items, like opening a chrome CSS stylesheet by clicking on a link in a XUL document.