On Aug 20, 2007, at 8:51 AM, Maury Markowitz wrote:
Thanks for all the comments folks, they've really
made me think about
what the aim of the project should be.
I'm assuming Maury doesn't mean offline
in the sense of grab a page,
disconnect from the net, edit it on a plane.
MAYBE, but if this is a technical challenge, then no.
My main problem is losing edits because of a browser problem or
timeout. Firefox and Safari has greatly reduced this problem, so the
need is not so pressing.
Another is having real editing. Firefox can Find in the editors, but
Safari cannot. I prefer Safari, but editing a long article can be a
real chore. Neither is ideal, however, for instance understand the tag
language, so they find things inside tags, which isn't appropriate.
And I really want something to make CITEs and REFs WAY easier. Right
now I often don't bother with CITE because it's just too much work. I
want something where I can just drag or paste an url into a box and
add anything I want to the CITE, and have the system maintain the tags
in the article body.
Not quite what you want, but I've been able to put the ref markup in
the InsertChar stuff that appears under the edit box. Had to tweak
it to deal with the space in <ref name=''/>; I just had it
str_replace from <ref_name='+'/>
Finally, I want to clean up the screen. In general terms the editor
takes up 25% of my real estate, and all the editor help and other
fields takes up the rest. The editor should be it's own window,
everything else should be put "elsewhere".
I haven't played with it much, but if you're on a Mac (which I'm
guessing based on your references to Safari), I believe Omniweb does
something similar to this. And of course, the Safari 3 beta lets you
drag the edit box to make it a different size.
as needed. Getting extensions to render their
content will be
interesting...
What extensions do you refer to?
Extensions that have parser hooks render content based on what's
inside the tags. You already know about CIte. There are lots of
others, some of which can be pretty complex. The RSS feed extension,
for example. There are extensions that do iFrames. The geshi
extension recolors code. It may not matter for you, but if you're
going to make this public, I think I'd like it to work with my custom
extensions that embed an image or fill a box with the results of a
database query, or reformat a DNA sequence to break it up into lines
with spaces every 10 bases.
In other words, I think you'd need to pull the parser code and all
the extension code into your local rendering engine if you really
want to be able to see what the page will look like.
Perhaps I misunderstand the goal.
> The only caveat I can think of is that
you've gotta make sure you
> have
> all the included files (mostly templates) downloaded before you go
> offline (and don't forget that templates can include templates,
> etc).
If these have links in the resulting HTML, CURL will get them all.
If not...
Maury
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=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054