RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: XML-SPY 4.4

[Jeff Beal <jeff dot beal at ansys dot com>]

I downloaded it for evaluation, and I thought it was completely unusable.
It didn't do anything intelligent with file entities, so if your document
spans multiple files, you have to open each of them individually.  That
wouldn't be too bad, but what's really bad is that it doesn't handle section
inserting correctly.  There are three ways to add new elements: Append (add
following-sibling of current element), Insert (add preceding-sibling to
current element), and Add Child (add child to current element).  I created a
chapter and was able to add a single <section> child.  With that <section>
selected, I couldn't append or insert a <section> tag, but I *could* insert
(not append) a <sect1> tag!  (This is completely invalid according to the
DTD.)  Then, with that <sect1> as the current tag, I could insert a
<section>!  I could easily get something like this:

<chapter>
  <section/>
  <sect1/>
  <section/>
  <sect1/>
  <section/>
  <sect1/>
  <section/>
</chapter>

Interestingly enough, when I validated, XML Spy complained appropriately
about the alternating <section> and <sect1> elements.

Even if they fix that bug, I thought there were a lot of usability issues,
especially in the Document Editor view, which would be the most intuitive
choice for DocBook editing.

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Jens Stavnstrup [mailto:js@ddre.dk]
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2002 11:34 AM
To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: XML-SPY 4.4


Does anybody have any experience editing Docbook documents with the latest
XML-SPY 4.4 ?

Regards

Jens