On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Bob Jamison wrote:
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 11:23:48 -0500 From: Bob Jamison <rjamison@...357...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] layers
True. And don't forget the main reason:
--- Inkscape is an SVG Editor ---
People forget that sometimes. ;-)
There are many programs that provide general-purpose desktop publishing. But Inkscape (and SP) fill a need that very -few- programs provide: being a good editor for W3C-compliant SVG. XML is the whole reason for the thing. In fact, a more complete XML editor, even one that handled mixed namespaces, would be desireable. It would be rather useless for an SVG coder to not be able to view or modify the DOM tree.
Having used Jasc Webdraw which provides only text editor (with nice syntax colouring) I find the XML Editor rather cumbersome and in some cases more of a workaround for a missing or poor dialog (please dont ask me to be specific right now, I'll file those bug reports as I see 'em).
I would hope that the XML Editor could become more seperable in future so that there would be the option to use any generic text editor (vim, emacs, gedit, etc) or xml editor (conglomerate, mlview, xmlspy etc) instead of the built in XML Editor.
The XML Editor shouldn't ever be neccessary but it there should be no need to remove it entirely either. There will always be rare cases where it is useful to have finer grained control of the XML than it makes sense to expose in the user interface.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org