h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Please post your comments here.

FM

I don't know what to say about it in its current form... It looks alright to me, though. Except for the "how to install" header (obviously!)
Oberon2001

Anything missing that you thought should be in there?

The 'how to install' bit is missing because we haven't decided what we will do here. It may well be that we wait for IE7 (with the .NET framework) to be more readily available. In which case it will simply involved copying files to various directories. We don't know.

Anyhow, thanks for taking the time out to read this.

FM

I really can't see anything at the moment... not even typos!
I'll check back though, when I'm not so tired.
Oberon2001

I have no helpful comments to make. It looks fine to me.

Tango

Hi there FM

I'm more than happy to give you my , but before I do, I want to make sure I'm not wasting your time [and mine ]

My strengths lie in the area of layout and readability (formatting, grammar etc) and I have a hunch that you might be aware of all the issues I might raise...

If you have something to say about the content and the actual function of the program itself, then now would be the best time to say it. Otherwise, I think it's probably best if we leave the stylistic issues until we've ironed out those relating to the functionality.

I shall definitely be in touch with you when we have a product ready to roll, and we need the manual sorting out.


FM

It sounds good, but could there be a 'view code' option? Part of the problem with WYSIWYG editors is that they often make scrappy code because it is sometimes difficult to guess what the user is after.

A simple example is if you make something bold and then delete it. You might end up left with which is impossible to delete because there's nothing in WYSIWYG mode to delete. Clearly, you could just make the program so it deletes empty tags. However, the user might want to simply change the bold word, in which case deleting the word (ie via backspace) and typing a new one would lose the boldness.

Another example. Say you have:

Frankie is cool.

And decide to make the first word bold:

Frankie is cool.

Then decide to make the rest of it bold too. The program would probably create:

Frankie is cool.

But ideally you'd want the whole phrase to be contained within one .

--

Maybe this isn't what you're looking for, but it'd be interesting to hear how you intend to do things like that.

Frankie,
You raise some valid points here. I suppose the glib reply would be 'well, if it looks right, then it is right'. I don't know what MSHTML does under these conditions, so perhaps I ought to find out sharpish. I suspect that when you delete bold text it will remove the tags as well. But if you were to delete all the plain text between two bold runs of text, I don't know.

The main problems with providing a 'source view' is that (a) you have to provide and maintain two MFC view classes for one document class, and (b) I would need to be continually translating the 'decorated HTML' used internally in GuideDog into XML in case the user wanted to swtich views. Euurghhh. Before I start running in C++, I think I'm having enough problems learning to crawl, let alone walk.

Fair enough - those were just the first issues that came to mind.

I think the idea itself is a good one - so best of luck. If successful, it would be good to see if it could be modified so that other XML schemes could be used...

I could help with doing CSS mockups of the h2g2 skins. I even have some basic ones already.

Oh, here's a link. It's a bit old (no brunel)

http://www.frankieroberto.com/z/DNA_Toolkit_0.6.zip

Thanks for that, mate. This is a technically very demanding project, and any help we can get from any quarter is very welcome. I did have a play around with some stylesheets. The best approach, it seems, is to use the XSL to convert the GuideML to XHTML, while 'decorating' the new tags with custom attributes. This tells the system what XML tags gave rise to the XHTML. It should be a doddle to convert it back.

How would you feel about doing some in-depth stylesheet work for us?

Yep - my package above does a similar thing - though doesn't convert back.

As for stylesheet work - well, i could give it a shot...

'give it a shot'?
You could do a very good job of it, from what I've seen . We'll definitely be using Internet Explorer as the base editing component.
The way I envisaged this process working was as follows:
* Get the stylesheet to convert the XML to XHTML, but add several attributes to each tag:
* GMLOUTPUT="YES"|"NO": determines whether the tag is output to the final GuideMl document
* GMLTAGNAME: the name of the GuideML tag that corresponds to the XHTML tag
* let the user edit the HTML
* Then use ANOTHER XSL stylesheet to convert the XHTML back to GuideML, using the GMLTAGNAME and GMLOUTPUT attributes to determine whether they are output

Think you could do that?

Might end up being a bit clunky, but could work.

Some guideml tags will end up being whole chunks of code though, so it won't just be one tag that needs to get marked.

I'm no good at programming, but I'd probably approach it by using java - a bit like the rich text editor in Hotmail.