Users Wish List

If your feature request is not listed here or if you want to insist on the importance of a feature, do not hesitate to send an e-mail describing it to .

This list is not sorted, that is, the rank of a feature request is not meaningful.

Annoying behaviors

• xml:space="preserve" should be honored even if a newly opened document is invalid.
• Inside a block with white-space:pre, at the end of the text, pressing the Enter key should add a new line instead of displaying a carriage return icon.
• Inside a block with white-space:pre, tab characters should be displayed like in any text editor (space between tab stops) instead of being made visible using little rectangles.
• The Search/Replace tool and the Spell-Checker tool should automatically skip elements having CSS property "display: none;".
• Current search and replace facility should be able to find and replace text contained in text fields inserted in the document view as generated content (using CSS extensions such as text-field(), file-name-field(), date-field(), etc).
• The Edit|Convert command maintains the content of the converted element. It should also maintain the attribute values of the converted element.
• CSS property "collapsed: yes|no;" should specify the collapsed state of an element view just after applying the CSS style sheet as a whole (e.g. after opening the document, after switching to another style sheet using the View menu, etc). In all other cases (e.g. View|Redraw, inserting a child which causes the view of its parent to be rebuilt, adding an attribute which causes the view of the element to be rebuilt, etc), XXE should preserve the collapsed state of a view.
• The document view is not automatically scrolled when you extend the text selection by keeping Shift-Down Arrow pressed.
• When scrolling the document view by dragging the scroll bar or by using the mouse wheel, the caret should not be automatically moved (to always keep it visible). Well, at least make this behavior an option and turn this option off by default.
• Using the Search/Replace tool or the Spell-Checker tool in a modular document is a very tedious. When these tools find a problem in an included, thus read-only, module, one needs to use Edit|Reference|Edit Referenced Document (Ctrl+Shift-E) in order to manually perform the replace in the file corresponding to the included module.
• XXE does not detect the case when one of the documents being edited has been modified using an external editor.

Ease of use

• Remember which elements have been collapsed in order to display the same view the next time the document is opened.
• It should be possible to configure XXE to hide rarely used elements when displaying the Edit tool. This is especially useful for large DTDs such as DocBook which defines hundreds of elements.
• It should be possible to configure XXE in order to have its GUI display localized element and attribute names.
• It should be possible to configure XXE in order to have its GUI display user-friendly names and/or short help lines for element and attribute names. XHTML example: display "Paragraph" instead of "p".
• It should be possible to copy or move nodes in the tree view by using drag and drop.
• The Edit tool should not reset its state when the editing context changes. For example, if you click somewhere and then use the Edit tool to display what can be inserted after implicitly selected element and if, after this, you click somewhere else, the Edit tool should keep the "Insert After" operation selected and should update its list of elements to show you what can be done there.
• The file chooser dialog box should allow to open more than one file at a time.
• The Character tool should display the symbolic name of the character (e.g. nbsp, mdash, etc) as well as its numeric code.
• Make tree view more compact. More generally, improve its usability when displayed side by side with the styled view.
• XXE lacks a command that makes it easy copying and pasting several cells/rows at a time from Microsoft Excel.
• XXE should suggest known elements when an element's type specifies a schema wildcard for its content.
• It should possible to set an attribute (e.g. align) on several table cells at a time.
• A lot of https Web sites use self-signed server certificates. XXE should make it easy examining and possibly accepting such certificates instead of displaying a cryptic error dialog box as it does now.
• The caret is not visible enough. It should be thicker.

Features

• file-name-field, a CSS pseudo-function which inserts in generated content both a text field control and a button which can be used to browse files, should also have a button that allows to view file content.

  Example: a file-name-field is used to specify an image file. Clicking on this additional button would start an external image viewer.

• It should be possible to open two or more views of the same document, using the same style sheet but having non-synchronized carets (similar to "Ctrl-x 2" in GNU Emacs). For example, one view could be used to read the beginning of the document and the other view could be used to edit the end of the document.
• More format plug-ins (a format plug-in allows to use XXE to edit a non-XML, though structured, file format):
  • A SGML plug-in.
  • An HTML plug-in.
  • A CSS plug-in.
  • A DTD plug-in.
• Ready-to-use configurations for:
  • The TEI DTD.
  • Norman Walsh's Website DTD.
• XXE should support not only the separated borders model for setting borders on table cells in CSS, but also the collapsing border model.
• XXE should support the CSS dynamic pseudo-class: :hover.
• Support the following technologies in XXE:
  • XForms
• Element templates and document templates should be dynamic. Static template = XML. Dynamic template = a mix of XML and script (à la PHP) which is evaluated just before the template is used.
• By using the technique described in Extensive use of the "Copy as Reference" command, I can do with XIncludes the equivalent of this:

  <!-- This entity is found in an entity file included in the DTD 
       of my document template.
       This entity file and the document template are typically not created
       by me, the author of the actual document. -->
  <!ENTITY myPhrase "The Name box specifies the name of the widget">
  
  ...
  
  <!-- Somewhere, in the body of the document, I can now insert this 
       reference. -->
  &myPhrase;

  but not the equivalent of this:

  <!-- This entity is found in an entity file included in the DTD 
       of my document template. -->
  <!ENTITY myPhrase "The Name box specifies the name of the &objectName;">
  
  <!-- As the author of the actual document, I define this other entity
       in the internal DTD subset in order to parametrize entity "myPhrase". -->
  <!ENTITY objectName "gizmo">
  
  ...
  
  <!-- Somewhere, in the body of the document, I can now insert this 
       reference. -->
  &myPhrase;

  That is, XXE supports boilerplate content, but not parametric boilerplate content. XXE should support parametric boilerplate content too.

• A dialog box should allow to specify:
  • the XSLT style sheet used to transform the document being edited;
  • optionally, some parameters for this XSLT style sheet;
  • optionally, the XSL-FO processor to use in the case of an XSLT style sheet which transforms the XML document to XSL formatting objects.
• Integrated support for revision control systems such as CVS, subversion (svn), etc.
• Support nested quotes in CSS style sheets. XHTML example:

  q:before {
      content: open-quote();
  }
  
  q:after {
      content: close-quote();
  }

  <q>Hello <q> world</q>!</q> is displayed like this: ``Hello ``world''!'' (language being en-US). It should be rendered on screen like that: ``Hello `world'!''.

• Add an option to suppress the XML declaration <?xml...?> in XHTML files saved by XXE, when the encoding used for the save file is UTF-8. Such XML declaration seems to disturb a number of famous Web browsers.
• It should be possible to parametrize the look of the tree view.
• It should be possible the configure the way special whitespace characters (tab, non-breaking space, etc) are displayed.
• XXE allows to specify document conversion parameters using the dialog box displayed by Options|Customize Configuration|Change Document Conversion Parameters. However, XXE does not allow to save specified parameters to a file in order to reload them later. This would be handy when working with the profiling DocBook style sheets. With such style sheets, the user has to specify a different set of document conversion parameters for each profile.
• When working with the profiling DocBook style sheets, it would be useful to view (i.e. in the styled view) only the portions of the document matching a given profile.
• XXE should support bookmarks.
• XXE should allow to open a document in read-only mode. This is really needed in the following case: a document is stored on a WebDAV server supporting write locks; the user just wants to view this document; she does not intend to modify this document and hence does not need to lock it.

Extensibility

• "New Configuration", wizard-style, dialog box which can be used to create a simple configuration for a custom document type by asking the user a few questions.
• Support of commands, generally macro-commands, which are automatically executed when a document is opened or saved.

  It would be useful if there were two macros associated with each operation: one to be executed before the open/save operation, and one after. In the case of a save operation, for example, the ``before'' macro would have access to XXE's internal functions for manipulating the document, while the ``after'' macro would be able to carry out post processing on the saved document (initiate XSL transformations, execute perl scripts, etc.).

Platform

• XXE should be available as a plug-in for Eclipse.