[Jexus-devel] Re: [freeroleplay] Re: Towards a better Document/Content MS

[Ricardo G. <ax...@uk...>]

Samuel Penn wrote:
> On Monday 24 May 2004 14:30, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
>>Sorry about that, you can examine a (very rough) early sample of the
>>proposed CML in our web CVS viewer here:
>>
>>http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/jexus/net.sf.jexus.core/xml/sample.xml
> 
> I started with <bold> tags, but being someone who writes the documents
> by hand, I soon got bored and everything mutated to <b>, <i> and so on.
> Actually, I have <s> and <e> (strong emphasis and emphasis) instead of
> specific font styles.

I'm of two minds whether or not to include styles such as even emphasis: 
after all, this is supposed to be a content-only format. It depends how 
much we can seperate style and

>>Good point. There are three options here:
>>
>>1. Server-centric: Tolerate the loss of information when OpenOffice
>>documents are "squeezed" into CML format.
> 
> I'd be against this, especially in the case where game rules are being
> stored. Consider an XML structure for a spell, or a beast. Both can get
> very complex.

You misunderstand, formats such as Yags would be unaffected by information 
loss. The information lost will be the style/layout information in the the 
OpenOffice document only. Yags data would be stored using an OO plugin and 
would not be affected. Given this, what is your opinion on this option now?

>>2.  Client-centric: We write a complex Java client, the server is just a
>>WebDAV repository of CML files with a HTML admin front-end. The client
>>imports content from other documents and exports content to other
>>applications, and is responsible for all the transformations. Plugins are
>>written for the client. Means writing complex client code.
> 
> Complex, but has the advantage of being accessible wherever you are
> online, especially if the Java is an applet or something similar.
> Could be totally thin client.

It would be, in effect, writing another word processor. Because of this, 
I'm unsure if this option is necessary. What would the Java client offer 
that, say, OpenOffice couldn't?

>>3. OpenOffice-centric - as 2 except we make OpenOffice the default format
>>and client. OpenOffice uses its own content.xml format that we can use. We
>>can write add-ons to OpenOffice to use additional data-sets, i.e. for
>>yagsbook, which are sent in the content.xml part of a OO file. Of course,
>>this limits us to using OO only.
> 
> Possibly straightforward, and other office programs (e.g. KWord) are moving
> towards the OpenOffice file format, but don't know how portable such things
> would be. Limits usage to thick clients.

I have to admit, I'm coming round to this option more and more. The above 
wouldn't be so much of an issue: OpenOffice (or OO.org) would be the thick 
client and its already been written. You couldn't run it on your PDA but 
you could import content from your PDA into OO.org. OO.org already has its 
own content format, and it already seperates style and layout into seperate 
documents within a OO.org file (in three handy files: content.xml, 
style.xml and layout.xml :).

In which case, Jexus just becomes a webdav storage facility with a web 
front-end. In fact, I'm not even sure what Jexus would be for: linkig 
content in a wiki like way? Dynamic publishing of content?

>>Don't know if I can help with that: not familar with a Zaurus (what is it?)
> 
> Linux based PDA, with mini-keyboard. 

Sounds dead nifty :)

> I noticed Maven on your site, and I've spent some time looking at it. It
> looks quite useful, and Iit's been added to the list of things I need to
> investigate.

I can't recommend Maven enough: its really revolutionary and time saving.

> I'm wondering whether this discussion would be better on the Jexus
> site, where it would be visible to people interested in the project.

Good point: forwarding this onto the Jexus development mailing list as well 
:) I suggest we send discussion on this to both mailing lists, unless 
anyone objects?

-- 
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
pre...@fr...