Re: XML/SGML

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

I can't be sure, but what I think Eric may be missing is that not everybody loads the menus, and therefore have modified to keyboard file to avoid them. Unfortunately (depending on one's perspective), there are a lot of goodies in the menu files that maybe should have been in the Editor. Keeping them out of the Editor helps its raw speed, I suppose, but the menus have an overhead of their own (which on a fast machine may be inelegant but not particularly noticeable).

For those folks who despise menus and dialog boxes, some of the stuff in the original menu files
that they find useful could be copied into a customized command file (with suitable modifications to
the routine and to the keyboard).

The decision to include something in the Editor was sometimes a philosophical one, and occasionally
the user interface people would clash with Dave Erickson over it: One of us would ask Dave about
adding a feature to the menus, and he would say, "If it was all that good a feature, I would
have put it into the Editor," or something similar. Dave was right in a very important way: The
Editor should do the basic stuff very well and very fast. The ancillary files like menus, keyboard,
and command files are for adding customizations and flexibility. Putting too much functionality in
the Editor would compromise XyWrite's great flexibiity. I think in Dave's opinion, at least for part
of the time I was at Xyquest, we put far too much in the menus/dialogs.

It would be wonderful to hear from Dave about all this, especially since I'm only seeing my side of
it. But I think he must have very good reasons for having stayed out of our discussions.

Tim Baehr