xml-dev - Re: Final alpha release of XED: lots of new features

["Michael Kay" <M.H.Kay@eng.icl.co.uk>]

>There are no installation instructions because all you have
to
>do is unpack the zip file and run xed.exe.

Thanks, it works now and I can't reproduce what I did wrong
before. The effect was that a DOS window came up and then
vanished.

Some usability observations:
- The help text is in a font that is too small for me to
read comfortably
- The notation for keystrokes is non-intuitive (e.g. M-<)
although it is now explained
- Right mouse click on selected text (as distinct from a
selected element) doesn't have the expected behaviour (it
causes some nearby element to be selected)
- Pasting (Ctrl/V) when text is selected is an error, I
would expect it to paste the clipboard contents over the
selected text
- I thought at first that clicking "preferences" had no
effect, I discovered later it had brought up a window that
was not visible because it was behind others
- XED is not very helpful when you try to open a file that
is not well-formed XML. (In my case a file I'm still
investigating because some parsers accept
it and others don't!)
- The box below the menu bar looks very strange when it is
not actually in use for editing attributes, element names,
etc

The following suggestions might be asking a bit much:
- It would be nice to make (more?) use of the DTD
- It would be nice if XED recognised that "Save As" to a
different directory can destroy your relative URLs, e.g. the
reference to the DTD
- It would be nice to have a prompt list of standard entity
names, e.g. &eacute;
- One operation I found cumbersome is splitting an element
such as a <P>paragraph</P> into two paragraphs. (The same
would apply to combining two into one.) I don't know if this
is common enought to warrant special treatment.

I shall try using it for a bit (in preference to PFE) and
see how I get on. Having said that, I don't spend much time
editing XML as most of it is software-generated. I do prefer
this approach, though, to the "tree" style editor.

Mike Kay


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