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On the status bar at the bottom of your editor list the tags that are currently open and in what order they were opened so that you can remember to close them in the right order.
Optionally create a margin on the left hand side that shows braces pointing to the places where currently open tags are
opened and, if scrolling back through previously written code, where they close.
The concept should be easily enough adapted to programming languages where the editor could indicate that the current piece of code is inside a particular loop or clause of an if statement.
Softguad's XMetal
http://www.softquad...t_xmetal_intro.html
Quite a powerful and configurable XML editor.
st3f - see the features list. XMetal provides the document structure browsing you (optionally) wanted, plus realtime rule checking against DTD, colour coding and a whole bunch of other validation stuff. There is an old SQML editor out there that does *exactly* what you ask (i.e. little more tracking where you are in the DOM at the base of the window), but I can't remember its name. I will post a link if it comes back to me. [mcscotland, Mar 25 2002, last modified Oct 05 2004]
[link]
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Baked by quite a few products. A link will follow.
(issue: this would not work for HTML because it is not a well-formed markup language i.e. you don't always have to close tags you open) |
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Good point. You would have to be able to set the editor as to how strict it should be: from sloppy html to xhtml. Alternatively it could take its settings from the DOCTYPE line at the beginning of the document. |
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To be able to deal with loose HTML, the editor would have to be aware of tags that will not nest e.g.
• an unterminated papagraph tag would be considered to be terminated at the spot that another paragraph tag or heading tag starts.
• a table row tag would be considered to be terminated when another table row tag starts or the table is closed etc. |
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It adds complexity to the program but should not be insurmountable. |
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mcscotland: I can't find the feature in the link you provided. Can you point me to the right spot? |
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Just had a browse around the site. Like XMetal, XMLSpy seems to be a heavily graphical tree-based XML program. Looks nice but not what I'm after at all. |
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The key difference is that a clickable tree down the left requires clicking to do stuff whereas a line in the status bar at the bottom doesn't need you to lift your pinkies from the plastic to correct mistakes. |
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That and both apps are XML editors and don't, I think, stoop to HTML. |
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Dreamweaver does an even better job of overwriting otherwise perfectly good HTML (I put it there for a reason, dammit!). Do anything beyond a basic static HTML site with Dreamweaver and you'll be asking the whole of Macromedia outside for a fight.
st3f - the app I can't remember (that I now can) was WordSmith. It's sooo long ago since I saw it in action (c1996) that I can't remember even a tenth of what it does. But I do remember it was an SGML editor that had a status bar down the bottom.
Question: when's an XML editor also a HTML editor? When you give it a DTD that describes HTML. Fair enough you will have to close all tags, but otherwise... |
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mcscotland: Can you remember anything else about Wordsmith? I've tried looking for it to see if it had any conceptual offspring but since almost everyone on the Internet seems to have named their freeware word processor 'wordsmith' I haven't found it yet. Even adding the term SGML doesn't narrow it down enough to be useful. |
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Some editors (Homesite comes to mind) will auto-complete a tag set for you (if you want it to) as you type. |
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