[REBOL] Re: [why-REBOL] Pros and Cons / what's so special
From: bry:itnisk at: 25-Jun-2004 21:17
> bic> There are parts of AltME that just bug the hell out of me, navigation
> wise.
>
> OK, but that has nothing to do with the fact that it was written in
> REBOL; look at the functionality it provides.
I think it does, some of my navigation problems have to do with keyboard
navigation, which in Rebol from looking at various keyboard hooking routines to
get control keys etc. can be somewhat tedious, I think that the tedium is what
explains the lack of reasonable keyboard navigation in rebol apps I've seen.
When you have a lot of different possible functionality to implement you tend
to
focus on 1. what is particularly easy to implement 2. what will really wow
people about my application
If some things are common, unnoticed until needed, and seldomly needed, or
needed only be a subset of clients, you tend not to build them. When I was
using
AltME I was in a hell of a lot of pain, because of the tennis elbow I was
suffering from and this also made other non-keyboard navigational issues more
of
a thorn for me. But for most people who use AltME I bet it doesn't even come
up.
> >> > PDF-maker
> bic> ...PDF-Maker is good, but it wouldn't fulfill my needs, and my
> bic> needs are such that I wouldn't consider building a system for
> bic> fulfilling them in Rebol.
>
> Have you sent Gabriele feedback about what your needs are for it, or
> looked at enhancing it yourself?
I think actually this is the problem that comes up with Rebol for me a lot, and
why I don't think of it for major things, because most of my work revolves
around quite heavy duty usage of XML. not simple xml, I mean that I need xml
support that will make it easy for me to seperate out namespaces, handle dtds,
unicode, and so forth. And hell, I don't have much time to build support for
what I need with Rebol because I can't take a couple weeks off to do it. Right
now I'm working one job full time, and me and some partners have a possible
project that would start next month, and run for three months, building a
cross-media management system - publishing, intranet, internet, possibly other
stuff, like blogs, etc. for a large airline's cargo division (it would only be
taking three months approx. since we already have all the components we would
be
building, so it's just a question of customizing, but still).
But anyway, so that's one thing I need all the time is xml support, this is why
I use XSL-FO for my pdf generation, as that is an xml-based language for
describing paginated media.
> What tools do you use for this task (just out of curiosity)?
>
In the system I built we support multiple xml input formats, xhtml, svg,
Docbook, TEI, VCard in xml format, RDF, etc. etc. We have a couple forms, built
in VB, which the user can use to assemble all the different document types they
are working with at the moment, set page dimensions etc. for each document type,
load in styles(we implemented a css like language that users could use to
write styles for their XSL-FO rather than having to deal with xslt or something
else) This css-based styles is combined with xslt to output xsl-fo. The xsl-fo
is then fed to a user chosen xsl-fo processor. There is the possibility of
saving the whole process using a macro and then running the styling process
over another set of documents. There is also another variation where the user
interface is not the client side vb form, but a web client, for a print on
demand solution - this is without the macro ability.
Both also support scripting of the xml files using a stack-based inline macro
language we developed, since the language is described with namespaced xml
markup, it follows that the applications we use have to be able to handle the
xml and the namespaces relatively easy.
We may have to build something for a korean cargo company later this year/early
next year, if so we are going to have to have support for south east asian
character sets, luckily there is an xsl-fo processor that supports all unicode
charsets, that being Antenna House. This is something I need obviously, support
for character sets, support for directionality of text, if we have a customer
that needs that we don't have to worry about building something new we just say,
oh yes, $3,000 more please thanks.
Because of the applications processor independence we can basically get it to
work with any xsl-fo processor.
This is of course part of a suite of media management tools, currently however
this is my part time job, when we get an order we do stuff with it, right now my
main work is still all xml related, but mainly governmental standardising work.
And damn it is draining.
