[htmlcsseditor-devel] Project development

[<uz...@la...>]

Hello everyone,

 

This is my first letter to this mailing list, and in it I thought I'll let
you know what is happening in the project, and answer some questions that
some of you have been sending me. Also, I would appreciate it if all
questions, observations and other issues concerning the project would be
either posted in the correct project section (bugs, cvs, tasks, forums,
etc), or in this mailing list, or, preferably, in both. Please don't
hesitate using these tools, they are meant to be used to improve our
project.

 

I'd like to thank you all for joining my humble project. It is encouraging
to know that more people are interested in the project and are willing to
help. I started working on this project when a friend of mine was working on
developing an html-based home page creator and needed a css editor to come
with it. Now that his project is down, I thought I'd publish my css editor
in SourceForge and make it available for other people who might find it
useful.

 

We now have 7 developers in our team (one admin, two testers, three web
designers and one developer), and after the first 31 days of the project it
was visited 1727 times, files were downloaded 83 times, and we rank 4083
(76.46) (whatever that means.) using SourceForge's strange ranking system.

 

I'd like to say some words about my original thoughts about the editor's
goals. Many web-based editors (like the FCKeditor
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fckeditor/) allow users to create and
publish web pages using a MS Word-lookalike editor that is used from within
the web browser. Once the user has finished editing her page, the program
translates the text attributes into html and css attributes and saves them.
This method has some problems: 

-          it does not allow for full usage of all css attributes and their
flexibility

-          it does not allow true html editing, but instead relies on simple
WYSIWYG editing

 

Using our css editor, I was trying to allow creators of real web-based html
to use a genuine css editor that will let users use both a WYSIWYG editor
and everything that css has to offer. The idea was to make the css editor
available for developers to interact with, using a Javascript API, in the
program's client side. This will enable the developers to write their
programs in any scripting language of their choice (PHP, ASP, JSP, etc.) and
enjoy the benefits of our editor through Javascript. Also, it will cause the
css editor to be fast and reflect css attribute changes instantly (because
pages do not need to be reloaded). 

 

And now for some Q&A:

 

Q: I want to ask you that whether the editor will change the css file. It
seems to me that the editor only shows the css code after changing, and the
user has to modify the css files his/herself.

 

A:  My idea was that the html editor will communicate with the css editor
through the API and will get information about the css attributes that the
user has made in the css editor. Whatever the html editor would like to do
with that information is her business. I would like to keep the editors as
separated as possible.

 

- - -

 

Q: It looks like you are using ActiveX to place the sidebar (???)...  I
would suggest that instead of using ActiveX, we could use iframes.

 

A: I have considered using iframes, which is a good idea, but is
unfortunately not supported by strict xhtml. If I would not find a way to
use xml/xslt in other browsers than IE, I will go back to using iframes.

 

- - -

 

Q: to make it work in mozilla you need to use the w3 spec DOM model for
javascript and xml, I personally do not know about this but after doing a
search for the javascript error which firefox1 produced I came up with some
good info at:  http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/upgrade_2.html#dom
+   http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html#dom also the spec
reads into it in detail, I believe this would make it work in all standard
compliant browsers: http://www.w3.org/TR/modality-interface/

 

A: hmmm. it looks like mozilla is really going to give us some hard time
trying to make it compliant. Maybe we should use xhtml and iframes. Has
anyone any other ideas? I found the following link:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/js-interface.html but couldn't really
understand how to make it work.

 

- - -

 

That's all for now. Once again I'd like to ask you to share all your
thoughts and comments of this project in the SourceForge project site or in
this mailing list. Also, don't be shy committing to the cvs!

 

Have a great new year,

 

Uzi Landsmann

Htmlcsseditor project administrator