[TxMt] XML support?

[David Casal]

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
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