[Xerte-dev] Re: HTML Editor for comment

[Julian Tenney]

Good stuff.

> I await Julian's comments though as I'm sure he's thought through most of what could be done (and how to do it) before.

Only conceptually. What I do know is that I found developing apps like this to be a lot better when you had some proper OO stuff going on, like in Flex: the Xerte 3 editor is very similar - show a tree, click a node, render the form, etc, but the Xerte 3 code was w-a-y easier to cope with than the desktop Xerte code was because you could easily extend components and could do inheritance etc, so I would encourage some sort of framework to underlie the architecture before you end up with spaghetti. I've not tackled a bigger application in JavaScript using those approaches: although the original XMLEngine was OO, with inheritance done the fake way with the prototype object. If you did that, and built components that used composition for the components you can't easily sub-class, that's where I'd start, conceptually, as I say: there are some design patterns that would be relevant.

If it were flex I would think of it as

Tree for the tree, or some sort of component that has the tree you're using composition;
Form (which holds the editable components)
EditableComponent (abstract) for capturing the form inputs
The actual form widgets (sub classes of EditableComponent) TextInput, TextArea, Media, ComboBox, etc. These all have things in common (getting / setting 
 values to the tree node, for example)

Something like that. The tree is pretty central, I think I started out playing with that and built around it.

The question might be about whether we want to replicate the existing functionality, or whether there are things to address that are currently difficult, or not covered by the xwd. For instance, being able to mess with the insert menu, depending on the level of the selected node? Probably other stuff like that. Global properties cropped up recently.

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, John
Sent: 08 May 2013 14:33
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: HTML Editor for comment

Thanks Ron, I've been monitoring the iPad/Android situation while developing it but with all the different browsers/os versions it gets a bit difficult to be sure that changes that fix one thing will work in the others. I think there are still a few css tweaks needed...

Apologies for the lack or save and play functionality, I'll stay up tonight ;-)

I think we need new ideas though and to collate/rate these by desirability. So far I'm duplicating an aged flash interface and we can do things in lots of different ways using html5/jQuery...

Please share the url with any colleagues/contacts who might be able to input to this. I await Julian's comments though as i'm sure he's thought through most of what could be done (and how to do it) before.

John

Sent from Samsung tablet



-------- Original message --------
From: Ron Mitchell <ronm at mitchellmedia.co.uk>
Date: 08/05/2013 12:35 (GMT+00:00)
To: 'For Xerte technical developers' <xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: HTML Editor for comment


Looks good John!
not only consumption on iPad but creation on iPad too - all seems to display fine on my iPad.
Where's the save and play buttons? ;-)

HTH
Cheers
Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, John
Sent: 08 May 2013 13:13
To: xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Xerte-dev] HTML Editor for comment

Hi all,

There's been much talk lately about treeviews etc for the anticipated html editor and I thought that I would put something together to view to get the discussions going further. Its not running directly from a xot install but is parsing a genuine LO xml file created with every page type and with subnodes.

http://xerte.smitcher.com/editor/

Any comments? Its still very much a WIP but at least demonstrates that jsTree can cope. The question is does it resemble where we want to go? Ron once mentioned possibly having plugins or some kind of visual data on the side panel. These panels are collabsible and resizable and can have multiple headers/footers. The bottom one shows a different type that can be shown and then collapsed.

I'm also interested in how the layout behaves in different browsers/os/devices.

Regards,

John

Sent from Samsung tablet

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_______________________________________________
Xerte-dev mailing list
Xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/xerte-dev

Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity, number SC021474

Winner: Times Higher Education’s Widening Participation Initiative of the Year 2009 and Herald Society’s Education Initiative of the Year 2009.
http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsevents/news/bycategory/theuniversity/1/name,6219,en.html

Winner: Times Higher Education’s Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers of the Year 2010, GCU as a lead with Universities Scotland partners.
http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsevents/news/bycategory/theuniversity/1/name,15691,en.html
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Xerte-dev mailing list
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