Re: [xml-dev] a report on any xml file, what information is useful?

[Frans Englich <frans.englich@telia.com>]

On Thursday 07 September 2006 13:48, bryan rasmussen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If you were generating views of XML files for display in some editor
> type environment what would people be interested in seeing in sort of
> a side display, things I can think of offhand -
>
> 1. Number of namespaces used
> 2. number of namespaced elements
> 3. Does it use specific namespaces
> 4. Any possible links in the documents
> 5. IDS and IDREFs?
> 6. XML Schema references?

I don't think that's a good way to approach it. I think one should start with 
what determining what the user do, to then conclude what the user need. For 
example, why would the user like to know the amount of namespaces? Many GUIs 
are over-loaded with complexity, and one thing that could contribute is 
statistics that aren't useful.

What I sometimes have felt an urge for is to know at what child-position an 
element has. For example, let's saying I'm edding node d:

<a>
	<b/>
	<c/>
	<d/>
	<e/>
</a>

Then I would like to know that it's the third child, because it's not so 
uncommon for content to somehow be related to that, according to my 
experience.

I also wonder whether xml-dev is the right place for this kind of user-centric 
questions. xml-dev isn't exactly representative.


Cheers,

		Frans