I just registered a new domain for my experiments with shared editing.
And Stan Krute, who is already doing interesting experiments, wants to hook up the RU FAQ via Groove. I’m all game, we’ll see what happens tomorrow.
In general, it’s very, very hard to build good editors with XML underneath and a wizzy user interface – continously re-rendering the users work area is difficult once you get beyond simple demo apps.
Something to note about Radio Userland outlines is that OPML stores the actual content as an XML-attribute. It’s not wrong, just a little different from most markup languages. A potential problem is that parsers treat attribute values and content somewhat different. But for the application developer this spec might be easier to use.
Remember, we are talking about live documents here. When you open an outline in RU, it looks like it does because it’s rendered that way – but underneath it’s all XML. And every time you save, that XML must be updated. But if adding formatting is allowed that must be stored somewhere, too.
The naive idea is to have the editor add things like this:
<text>This is plan text, <bold>some bold text</bold>, more plain text and some <italic>italics</italics>.</text>.
But polluting your content that way is usually a bad idea. A cleaner alternative is to encode character positions and what kind of formatting and save that as special attributes. Naturally, stuff like that is completely application-specific – but extra attributes are easier to ignore.