Subject: Re: [patch] Lists support in HTML export
From: John L. Clark (jlc6@po.cwru.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 14 2001 - 22:27:57 CST
On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 01:41:30PM +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
> I looked at the code. It looks very clean. I'm sure Sam will test it out
> thoroughly once he gets back online.
>
> I'm certainly looking forward to being able to export lists to HTML. With
> that in place I can do lots more of my HTML stuff in Abi. (I can add
> links by hand.) Plus our next release announcement can 100% Abi :-)
That's true! I'm glad this is satisfactory.
> >
> > Is our interface to document properties really done solely by lookup tables
> > of strings? If so, why is it not done instead like a database, with IDs
> > for properties and their values, which map to strings when necessary for
> > writing? I'm still pouring over our piecetable and surrounding
> > structure code, and it will be a while until I am at all comfortable
> > with it, so forgive my naivety.
>
> These are good questions. Yes our interface to doc properties is all
> though strings.
>
> Dom recently committed code to do binary searches on string properties but
> we have also considered using enums for doc properties too. I'm not sure
> why the abi designers went with const strings over enums. enums would
> certainly be much faster. I guess they thought that using const strings
> would be more robust and perhaps more easily interfaced to XML parsers.
I can understand the benefit to the interface with our text based
interfaces (the XML parsers), but I don't understand the robustness
issue. I would think enums would be significantly less error prone.
They would be much more straightforward, cutting out our need for a lot
of workarounds to looking up strings. At least from a beginner's
understanding of what's going on.
>
> If you're working through the PieceTable I suggest that doing the most
> recent POW would be a useful learning experience as well as fixing a bug
> that makes editting large docs really painful.
I read over the POW, and I've been thinking about zapping it. I have
classes starting on Tuesday, so I really don't know how much time I can
spend on Abi hacking. I definitely hope I will still be able to keep up
with it, though. That said, may I tentatively zap it, and encourage
anyone willing to help me to do so? I will work on it, as well as
continue my work with the HTML export and of course, reading over source
code.
Take care,
John
P.S. It's not necessary to CC to me; I lurk attentively on the mailing
list (and hope to continue to get more involved).
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