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