Friday, November 18, 2005

killer app

Is it too much to ask? All I want is the ultimate application.
  • The ability to parse text like Excel (Text → Data to Columns function) - useful for breaking up text and inserting XML tags between bits of it

  • A global find and replace function like the one in Text Pad, with regular expressions, and which remembers your previous search strings and replace strings and stores them in a drop-down menu for you to reuse, but also has the ability to search and replace multiple lines of code like the find and replace function in Dreamweaver

  • A directory tree display and site manager function like the one in Dreamweaver (where you can select multiple files from different folders)

  • A pretty-print function like the one in XML Spy

  • The ability to customise how the text appears in code view (another great XML Spy feature)

  • The ability to display XML Schemas graphically (XML Spy and oXygen)

  • The ability to easily expand and collapse the DOM tree (also from XML Spy)

  • Drop-down tag and attribute editor for XML and XHTML (Dreamweaver and XML Spy)

  • and drop-down property and value selector for CSS (Dreamweaver MX 2004)

  • Built-in code validation (XML Spy)

  • A design view like the one in Dreamweaver and the ability to transform XML using XSL like in XML Spy

I'm sure there's more but I can't think of them at the moment. If all the various software for editing code had all of these features, it would be so much nicer. Particularly annoying is the lack of a global find and replace function in XML Spy (you can only do one file at a time).

2 comments:

Phil Wilson said...

not much then.

Joe said...

Pah, you kids today! When I was a lad, knee-high to a 5 & a bit floppy disc drive we had to programme away in Basic.

Basic? Bloody luxury! Before that we ahd to use machine code; had to get up half an hour before we went to bed to programme it in and we had no compilers...

Machine code? Luxury! We used to have to steal granny's knitting needles to punch holes in cards... etc

BTW, you forgot to ask for your holographic-neural interface :-)