Hi Justin,
Thanks for your reply.
On 3 Nov 2004, at 01:51, Justin French wrote:
I imagine that the HTML bundle is a really good starting point -- can you just use the HTML bundle? What's missing from the HTML bundle that we'd need to implement for the XML bundle? If you can start putting together a wishlist of changes based on the HTML bundle and what needs to change for the XML bundle, then I'm happy to build the XML bundle, or even teach you how to do it.
I'm just wondering though, what happened to the existing XML bundle?
In any case,
The HTML bundle is indeed able to highlight syntax for XML efficiently. However, there are weaknesses, from my POV:
-the HTML bundle seems to underline each tag (why does it do that?) -however, it underlines the namespace, not the tag itself, when a namespace is used. For example, map:components will get 'map' highlighted but not components. -because the HTML bundle is not namespace-aware, textmate cannot offer any validation. I don't mean validating against particular schemas, but just whether the document is well-formed XML. Here, we're talking about the fact that if I give <foo><bar>foobar</bar></foo>, the editor will understand I need to close tag <bar> before I can close tag <foo>.
I've never had to write text editor plugins, even less XML-aware editors, so I'm going to be pretty useless at this, though I'm perfectly willing to learn.
I suppose the bundle paradigm in textmate might be similar to the JEdit plugin structure (though that's in Java, and David Hanson is going to call me a blasphemer here). Please look at:
http://plugins.jedit.org/plugins/?XML
The most important parts of that plugin in my working life (and I assume anyone's who is involved in dealing with XML webapps) is tag and entity completion, and well-formed checking.
It's pretty easy, and my thinking is that 99% of the work has already been done in HTML.
Is the Textmate bundle scheme suited to tag-checking, etc.? Or does it simply aim to cope with syn tax highlighting and completion?
Hope to get this off the ground, as the combination of bash scripting and simple interface makes TD my favourite editor right now and I'd like it to stick.
david