Loadable DTDs - Life Beyond HTML

Who uses HTML any more? Old timers? In fact times are changing quickly. Web development might be largely PHP or it could be XHTML or XML using XSL or transformed by XSLT. For that matter you aren't that far now from DocBook. Quanta has always been extensible. You could hand edit tag files and toolbar files as they are all XML. The problem with the original design of Quanta was two-fold. First it was married to HTML. No matter what you did there was all the HTML tagging staring at you. If you added a tagging language and there were conflicting tag names that was too bad. Second it was not easily modified. This and more is being addressed today.

We are nearly through with the foundational code to be able switch DTDs, to work with psuedo DTDs and even to allow multiple DTDs/psuedo DTDs to co-exist in a document. Now when you load a file Quanta will look for a DTD declaration and as we continue and complete this Quanta will switch toolbars and tag files according to your document needs. Auto completion follows too but this behavior is requisite before any consideration of WYSIWYG can be made. What we are working on is creating a set of standard document editing actions like paragraphs and bold and such and making it so you can register these actions in a new DTD and they will appear the same on the toolbars. Then you can load up a toolbar and an XML or DocBook DTD and have a consistent performance as with HTML... but now you can have all the advantages of these other markup languages. For standard tasks it becomes operationally transparent. Because you can download and install these "DTD Packs" you can now take on new markup or scripting with much more ease and greater productivity.

Now we have a whole new world of options. As a lead developer you can spend a small part of your day and create a complete configuration for content creation. You take this customized (crippled) Quanta to your marketing and content people and say "edit your content in here and send it to me". They can do it all with XML and you can then transform it of process it with PHP or whatever. Of course this will be more attractive when WYSIWYG is available. Don't ask when that is unless you're ready to volunteer but it will arrive in the the not too distant future. Obviously the big benefit here is to create clean work environments.

Where Are Your Docs?

Check it out. We now have docs for Quanta under development thanks to the initiative of Robert Nickel. What a guy! Take a look.

Loadable Toolbars and Templates

Our Docs have excellent explanations of these as well as how they are scoped. I hope you play with them and see the value.

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