Would anyone be interested in...

[xtknight]

Would anyone be interested in a freeware, open-source, low-resource (X)HTML editor? The text editor portion would basically be like Notepad but have Intellisense-like features (Microsoft's name for context sensitive help.) For example when you type the A tag, it would have href, target, etc. in the list. The code will be fully color coded. Also it could run HTML tidy (verifier program) on your document and check for HTML/XHTML compliance via the W3 website. It would have a tab for IE preview and a built-in Mozilla (Firefox) preview. I may also be able to do WYSIWYG via the IE control somehow. The look of the interface, like the menu bars and command bars, would be very similar to Frontpage 2003, but drastically less bloated. Real-time updating of the preview (per each finished HTML tag) is also very easy to do. I may also include templates coded by myself, like DHTML menus and what not, completely free for everyone to modify and use as they like with no obligations. I may also have a help bar that points to (or "embeds") W3Schools.com. This interface to this program will be easily customizable for different colors in the text editor, etc. I'd be coding this mainly in Visual Basic and possibly some portions in C++. I aim to make the whole program less than 5MB including all dependencies. Anyone think this is a good idea? I'll take any suggestions for what you'd like to see in this program, especially features you'd like to see that haven't been touched on already by other programs. I'm making this for you Anandtechers out there.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I've seen a few XML / HTML editors recommended here so you might be reinventing the wheel, but if you can outdo exising ones or just work in a different way than they do you might find a good sized audience for it.

I sometimes want something simple that offers really basic WYSIWYG, like bold, italic, underline and maybe bullets, and that generates clean HTML instead of the hideous garbage that Word spews out. You might be able to offer something like this using a Rich Text Edit control like WordPad uses.

I suppose you could also offer semi-WYSIWYG where bold, italic, underline work but other tags like table cells are kept as < tags >

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
I've seen a few XML / HTML editors recommended here so you might be reinventing the wheel, but if you can outdo exising ones or just work in a different way than they do you might find a good sized audience for it.

I sometimes want something simple that offers really basic WYSIWYG, like bold, italic, underline and maybe bullets, and that generates clean HTML instead of the hideous garbage that Word spews out. You might be able to offer something like this using a Rich Text Edit control like WordPad uses.

Yup, that's exactly what I aim to do. I need some ideas on how to further improve upon already existing freeware HTML editors. I'll see what I can do with the IE WebBrowser's WYSIWYG edit function. Think of my program as a future version of Frontpage Express (old program that was included with Win98 that was primitive and WYSIWYG), which will have XHTML compliance checking in it, and something like a 'compile' function where you'll see all the errors and warnings (possible problems and recommended optimizations you could apply to your web page). I want to make error-checking, compliance verification, link verification, spell checking, and browser compatiblity a piece of pie with this editor, whereas the freeware editors I've seen are essentially a Notepad with tag insertion buttons, and if you're lucky, a WYSIWYG interface. I also want to include a 'raw text/code insertion mode', where you press a button and everything you type from thereon will appear directly on your page in all it's raw-textual glory. For example, a less than sign would be replaced by ampersand lt (or whatever the symbol is) as you type in that mode. I might even include image compression things using libraries such as freeware JPEG or PNG ones.

 

[everman]

Maybe you should take a look at Quanta, or Eclipse. They are free, open source, and you can contribute code. You could possibly do your own eclipse application.

 

[xtknight]

Any other ideas??

 

[bofkentucky]

HTML-Kit, its got plugins for most langauges, hooks into a XML validator, autocomplete, spell check, regualr expressions/batch actions. all kinds of good stuff.

 

[tfinch2]

There are already enough text editors.

 

[kamper]

I want a free editor that does everything for xml: xpath, xsl, xquery, xinclude... autocompletion, formatting, spec validation (dtd and xsd at least) and it has to run on every platform that I want to use it on (windows and linux at least) I imagine something could be built out of jEdit, if it hasn't already, because most of these tools have already been written in java.

 

[statik213]

Originally posted by: kamper
I want a free editor that does everything for xml: xpath, xsl, xquery, xinclude... autocompletion, formatting, spec validation (dtd and xsd at least) and it has to run on every platform that I want to use it on (windows and linux at least) I imagine something could be built out of jEdit, if it hasn't already, because most of these tools have already been written in java.

jEdit or eclipse is probably the best way to go.....
if you guys are thinking of writing a plugin/view for ^^^ (eclipser prefereably) count me in.

 

[statik213]

there's already an eclipse project: here
Sorry OP didn't read your post completely, eclipse will blow your 5MB requirement out of the water..... but it woiuld be a lot easier than starting from scratch.