Re: [xml-dev] A proposal for simplify XML text editing and subsequent pr

[Philip Fearon <pgfearo@googlemail.com>]

Virtual line-breaks are attractive and they're something I pondered,
but they're not part of my proposal because I couldn't try them out,
but that doesn't mean others can't provide the feature of course.

With virtual line-breaks I hit issues because I was relying on RTF
(specifically \li)  to do horizontal character positioning, this needs
a \par \pard paragraph which is converted to a \n character when read
as text and is therefore indistinguishable from real line-breaks. The
\line command would have given me virtual line-breaks, but then no
indentation.

Yes, it would be excellent to see nxml-mode support for this proposal.

Editing 20MB xml files sounds quite formidable, I can see why
whitespace modifications might be an issue.

Phil

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Mike Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 08/21/2011 03:35 AM, Philip Fearon wrote:
>>>
>>> Seems a reasonable approach for a GUI for new data.
>>>
>>
>> Depending on your precise definition for a GUI, perhaps this proposal
>> could still work in predominantly keyboard-driven text-only interfaces
>> (hopefully it's Ok to mention emacs and vi)? For such text-only tools
>> where there's no adjustable left-margin as such, I would hope it's
>> possible to emulate this behavior using padding characters but
>> tracking them continuously as they're inserted by the tool and
>> protecting them so that they can be stripped safely (knowing that the
>> user didn't type these characters) when the XML is saved, so to all
>> intents and purposes they never existed. I haven't tried this, and I'm
>> far from certain that users of this type of tool would even welcome
>> it.
>>
>
> I use emacs/nxml-mode and would welcome such an option. Even better though
> would be the ability to insert "intelligent" virtual line breaks so that
> editing 20MB xml files with no line breaks becomes feasible without
> destructive whitespace modifications.  Was that part of your proposal too?
>
> -Mike
>