So I programmed most of my morning away by working on Angles, one of the project I’m
contributing to at MITH.
Angles will eventually be “an online XML editor tuned to the needs of the scholarly text encoding community”. Development of this project in-house is limited: the idea is to develop components via “code-sprints” at events where the DH community gathers. I wasn’t there, but at the last TEI Members Meeting a few people put together a TEI validation component.
We’re building Angles on top of the Ace editor, which is already quite powerful. We’re adding components to do validation, save files in the browser local storage, handle validation errors and other notifications. Eventually we’d like to include contextual help, i.e. show a description of the TEI element where your typing cursor is or suggest elements that can be contained in your current element. Basically those features that commercial XML editors provide that are so essential when authoring TEI. The next code sprint will be happening in Lincoln, Nebraska in July, during DH2013. It’ll be informal, so you won’t find it on the program, but we’ll make sure to spread the word to interested developers. If you’re interested, send us an email! The code is available on GitHub.
Here’s a list of features we’d like to work on with you at the next code sprint:
- notifications
- unit tests
- context-sensitive help
- ODD integration
I’ve been spending some time this morning setting up Backbone.js models and views to handle notifications. Angles uses a centralized event dispatcher with Backbone, so I’ve added a new event that allows to push one or more structure messages (notifications) to the UI.