Hi,
I'm one of the developers with the Audacity audio editor project. Our code keeps being pulled towards a kitchen-sink architecture where everything people might ever need gets integrated in (FTP for podcasting, play lists, MIDI-Editor, de-noising tools etc). We're trying to fight back against this trend by more and more moving to 'bridging', where we find ways to bridge to other applications that already do the job.
One direction is with XML editing. Our project file that holds the descriptions of the audio clips is an XML format. I'm thinking we should bridge to: http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net/ for display/update. I like the XCE editor, it uses the very powerful Scite component.
What I'm wondering is, how tightly integrated is the built in XML editor in Inkscape? Are there a raft of services that XCE/Scite would need to support to have (the option) of bridging to an external editor? Does it even make sense to be looking in this direction, or should I be looking for smaller 'footbridges' rather than bridges with 'motorway traffic'? Any comments and feedback welcome. At the moment Audacity does not integrate any XML editor at all, but I am thinking we will need to as our project structure gets more complex, for the same reasons that Inkscape already does.
This is at a very early stage, I'm just looking around and getting impressions.
--James.