May 13, 2005

Designing an editor is hard

Four hours ago I sat down and started laying out a list of items Verbosio (my prototype XML editor) needs implemented to make it useful to people.

Right now, I have 26 things I've added to that list (for today).

  • Two of these are "done".
  • Four are documentation items, which I'm doing as I go.
  • Four are pure ECMAScript objects & methods I have yet to implement.
  • Seven are common operations for Mozilla developers (file i/o, clipboard, that sort of thing)
  • Three still need some design / specification work done in my head.
  • Five qualify as "extension modules", even though they're all required to make Verbosio minimally useful...
  • One extension module is optional (debugging) and not yet designed.

Those are just the ones I brainstormed. Getting a working prototype could take a while. (One of the common operations is importing JSLib for file operations. For better or for worse, JSLib's file module works, and would be a nice standalone product from them. If there's a better way, I'll take it...) Also, bear in mind I'm doing this entirely in chrome, IDL and JS components. So there's no special back-end coding going on here.

But when I'm done, if I do everything on the checklist, it'll be one of the best-documented projects based on Mozilla you've ever seen...

Posted by WeirdAl at May 13, 2005 12:23 AM
Comments

Sounds really nice!
Can't wait to see the results.

Posted by: Joel at May 13, 2005 1:26 AM

Not hard. Very hard.

(From Alex: :-p)

Posted by: Daniel Glazman at May 13, 2005 1:27 AM

Sounds good,
hoping for the best outcome.

Posted by: Omar Khan at May 13, 2005 11:08 AM

You should use MonkeySage's FileIO module... it works very similarly to JSLIB's but is standalone and small.

We use it in QuickNote.
http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/quicknote/src/content/jsio.js?rev=1.5&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

Posted by: Jed at May 13, 2005 3:14 PM

The title remember be of a rant by Daniel about how few people can even conceive editors are definitely not an easy tasks.

Posted by: jmdesp at May 14, 2005 8:02 PM

well its not a comment...but a request-can u plz guide me on designing an editor.What basic skills it requires and where i should begin from.
If u could..

(From Alex: I think a better person to ask that of is Daniel Glazman. I for one haven't fully figured the answers out...)

Posted by: Umaima at June 8, 2005 12:31 AM