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The Dark Site
An Intelligent Web Environment
Episode I: The Editor
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Releasenotes |
What is it? |
Requirements | Features |
Known Issues (aka Bugs;-) | Credits
Online-Version |
Please visit the online-version of this document if possible!
There you will find latest Preview-Versions, which are not released to BeBits
(for stability reasons), enabling you to contribute feedback to coming versions and find out bugs before the release.
Also, news and status-updates can be found there.
What's New In Version 0.7.1.6 ?
Features
- international encodings are now supported
- the document-encoding is automatically detected if possible (see below)
- no more hassle with &entities; just to represent accented characters, Umlaute,...
- document-encoding can be manually selected and does not have to match the encoding in the META-tag (important for Russian users, IIRC:)
- faster file-loading (larger buffer used)
- default-encoding can be specified
Bugfixes
- Preview
- preview-file is now only written when first preview-command is issued, instead of immediately after opening a file
- rewrote the code to be more straightforward and logical (easier maintenance;)
- fixed keyboard-scrolling (could not go to bottom of page with Option+PgDwn) - reported by Oleg "2sheds" Kourapov
- Syntax-Styling is now single-threaded, this reduces overhead needed for synchronisation and makes it more responsible and lively
- after saving a new file, mime-info is now updated to show correct icon and type (only default-icon was shown before)
- files with zero length are handled properly now (e.g. necessary for Tracker-templates) - reported by Gianpaolo IIRC
- Prefs/SyntaxStyling: comments were ignored :-( - reported by Michael Koenig
- Untitled-count was raised when a file was opened
- various internal source-cleanup and small fixes/enhancements
How to specify the document-encoding
In HTML, you specify the document-encoding in a META-Tag inside the <HEAD>-section:
<HEAD>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
...
Then, you can use all characters from that encoding (in the case of iso-8859-1, all western european characters, like á, ü, ö, ß,...)
without having to resort to entities (e.g. ä for ä).
This makes the code more readable and easier to write and maintain. The target-browser must be HTML-4-compliant to interpret document-encodings correctly
(tested on all BeOS- and various Windows-browsers: Opera 3.62, NetPositive 2.2, Netscape/Mozilla >= 4.x, Explorer).
Read more at the W3C-Site ("document representation").
In DarkSite, you can specify the document-encoding separately, using the new menu Settings/document encoding or using the
Encoding-popup in the file-panel.
Existing Features
Highlights
- speedy Syntax-Styling - actually a bugfix (!), I managed to get syntax-styling up to speed...
- Open-Menu now expands to show recent documents, just like in StyledEdit
- Type-O-Matic: There are now shortcuts for 3 often used HTML-tags:
| Shortcut |
Code inserted |
Alt + Space
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| Shift + Enter
<BR>
| Alt + Enter
| <P>
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(Note: If you have configured Alt as the shortcut-key in the "Menu"-Preferences,
you have to use Ctrl instead of Alt (i.e. the Command-key).
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(Type-O-Matic will be fully configurable and more powerful in a later update)
- Auto-Conversion from CR+LFs (Windows) to LFs (Be et al)
- Window-sizes and -positions are now saved (for the Main-, Settings- and Search-Window)
- Tip: You can configure the default window-position&size by adjusting an empty window
- the horizontal scrollbar now reflects real width of the document (no trivial task, really!)
- implemented a more intuitive vertical navigation: the horizontal position is retained over shorter lines
(means: the cursor is moved back to the original horizontal position after being moved to a shorter line)
- This will be configurable later - just try it out and see!
Other improvements
- support for wheely-mice added :)
- Search-Window now remembers options and Find/Replace-Texts (due to technical reasons, the "Find In"-setting
is not yet restored)
- implemented wordwise selection and navigation
- added keyboard-scrolling (use
Option+Cursorkeys)
other minor improvements
- "Untitled" documents begin with 1
- Search-Window: changed type to titled window (bigger frame), revised labels
- Statusbar: now shows filesize and dirty-indicator
TODO
- Project-support (comes next)
- live HTML-Help and a TAG-inspector
- implement Unlimited Undo
- implement Search across all open windows
- and of course the new Universal Syntax Styler (DUHTM) with support for PHP, Perl, REBOL,...
Please NOTE
When loading in a page, the text is analyzed sothat nullbytes are stripped, Windows-formatting
is converted to BeOS to avoid nasty black boxes in the display, and the document-width is determined.
I hope you find the delay bearable, compared to these benefits..:^)
What is it?
The Dark Site is intended to become an integrated, intelligent environment for creating HTML-documents.
I am currently concentrating on the Editor, to allow for a good insight into your HTML-code.
Afer the editor is ready to allow for smooth and rapid coding, I will add other modules, such as Inspectors for
specific HTML/XML-tags or a SiteManager (see Planned Features).
The aim is to aid web-developers in HTML-coding as much and efficient as possible, without interfering and getting in your way.
Take a look at the planned features to get an idea of my vision:-)
I have many things in mind, but I am interested in your opinions, bug-reports and motivation -
your feedback will be appreciated and answered, either personally, or here (later).
What is it not?
The Dark Site is not intended to become a WYSIWYG-HTML-Editor like Dreamweaver or Pagemill/GoLive - there are several reasons for this:
- It would be very hard to code - I really don't have the time and manpower for this, better spend my time on other BeOS-projects, too...;)
- These editors are often not as intuitive to use as advertised - text-editors OTOH are very easy to handle - just type away..!
- They often produce code of questionable quality - automatically generated code will never reach the quality of manually
fine-tuned code, but bloating your HTML-code and slowing down the page-loading-time.
- the WYSIWYG is a fake anyway: it only helps you when designing the webpage, but it will always differ from
a browser-rendered page - and this is all what counts in the end: how does it look in the real world?
If you need this kind of tool, InSite Designer (formerly named "Weboardo") might be worth to check out.
So because of these issues, I decided to take another approach:
What You Code
Is What You Get
This will be the main concept in The Dark Site: concentrate on XML/HTML, not the rendering - this will be done externally -
allow hands-on-the-code, but offer as much and as intelligent help as possible, thus bringing you all
the advantages of hand-coded HTML, without requiring you to do everything by hand without any help.
Requirements
- Brainware: some HTML-Skills: I want to add some helpful features as soon as I can, but this tool assumes you have at least some
basic knowledge of HTML.
- Software:
liblayout 1.3.0 or higher -
otherwise, you won't be able to launch the app.
Features
- Editor
- lightweight, fast and flexible:)
- extensive, live and configurable syntax-coloring
- the most versatile Browser-Preview, unmatched and only possible in BeOS!
- works with all versions of NetPosistive and Opera
- updated on various events: specify a timely interval, update on save, update after n changes or completely manual
- Only one browser-window per page is opened for preview
- intelligent, HTML-optimised Search and Replace
- search for specific parts in your HTML-document (search code, comment, text separately!)
- uses standard shortcuts and menus like in BeIDE or StyledEdit
Planned for 1.0 and later
- Editor
- intelligent Type-O-MaticTM: automatic conversion from special chars to entities and other HTML-code
- live HTML-Help, online lookup and Tag-completion
- Toolbar for the most important Tags
- Intelligent Inspectors
- allowing you to "configure" the HTML-Tags... more info on this will be published as the development progresses.
- Site-manager
- shows the structure of your site
- shows the relations of the site-elements
- later: FTP-support to synchronise with the online-version
Known Issues
- Problem: When using Undo, the horizontal scrollbar might not be updated correctly.
Solution: This can only be solved with implementing my own (unlimited) Undo-mechanism,
which I am working on now.
Screenshots
Please visit the online-version for extended information - to keep the size of the archive down,
the screenshots are not included here.
Closing Words and Credits
I have created The Dark Site because of my own needs (selfish as I am;), and I am using it for my own web-work (also for this document, needless to say;),
so you can be sure I will try to keep it as bug-free as I can.
However, if you encounter problems or have ideas, only if you submit bug-reports and feedback, I can do something to make them a reality and improve the DarkSite !
Special Thanks this time go to:
- Kevin Weiss for bugreports and more!:)
- Ted Leeuwesteijn for his tremendous support, feedback and motivation !
- Dianne Hackborn, for her quick&helpful support and for keeping BeOS going!
- Billy Kakes for his good suggestions (small but useful!),
- Sergei Dolgov for his patience with the encoding- and liblayout-issues..!
- Nicolas Mougel for hosting a nice DarkSite-download-page and giving good feedback
And last but not least:
- Marco Nelissen for being a productive and supportive Be-engineer and
for the great GUI-library liblayout
- ...and all those nice people who submitted constructive, nice and helpful feedback!
I appreciate your comments and I am looking forward to hearing from you (again) :-)
Last updated on: January 10th, 2001
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