As I was updating documentation for the incoming Novelang-0.16.0 I suddenly got bored that Safari doesn’t display raw XML in a convenient manner. Camino does a far better job by assigning a default CSS and some JavaScript enabling element folding.
“Let’s have some fun”, I said to myself. I quickly drafted a CSS applying directly to Novelang’s XML elements. Including the CSS was done with one line of code inside the
XmlWriter. XML just needs a processing instruction like this:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="/xml.css"?>
As I quickly discovered, this was the wrong approach. CSS have no mean to add the name of the element itself through
:before and
:after pseudo-selectors, so for each XML element I should add the two selectors and copy-paste the name of the element. And giving the element names a special appearance is not possible, so the element tag would have the same appearance than its delimited content. CSS for XML are fairly limited, indeed.
Now I realize that raw XML is only useful for debugging stylesheets, so it’s not a good place to put eye-candy to. If folding makes sense, it would be on default HTML view, for getting an overview of generated levels.
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