It’s been quite some time since my last blog post – almost six months. The reason is that I’ve been very busy. We are doing a lot of exciting development within Xcential. We are developing a number of quite challenging projects around the globe.
If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember that I was working on an HTML5-based XML editor. That development was two years ago now. We’ve come a long way since then. The basic editor has been stripped down, componentized, and has being rebuilt to be a far more robust, scalable, and adaptable solution. There are more details below, which I will expand upon as the editor rolls out over the next year.
- Legal Citations
It was almost a year ago since the last Legislative Data and Transparency Conference in Washington D.C. (The next one is coming up) At that time, I spoke about the need for improved citation management in published XML documents. Well, we’ve come a long way since then. Earlier this year a Technical Committee was formed within OASIS to begin developing some standards. The Legal Citation Markup Technical Committee is now hard at work defining markup models for legal citations. I am a member of that TC.
The reference management part of our HTML5-based editor has been separated out as a separate project – as a citation interpreter and reference resolver. In our development tests, it’s integrated with eXist as a local repository. We also source documents from external sources such as LII.
We now have a few citation management projects underway, using our resolver technology. These are exciting projects which will be a huge step forward in improving how citations are managed. It’s premature to talk about this in any detail, so I’ll just leave this as a teaser of stuff to come.
- XML Editing for Legislation
The OASIS Legal Document ML Technical Committee is getting ready to make a large announcement. While this progress is being made, at Xcential we’ve been hard at work refining the state-of-the-art in XML editing.
If you recall the HTML5-based editor for Akoma Ntoso from a couple of years back, you may remember that is was based around all the new HTML5 technologies that have recently been incorporated into web browsers. We learned a lot from that effort – both good and bad. While we were able to get a reasonable tagging editor, using facilities that made editing far easier, we still faced difficulties when it came to basic XML editing and scalability.
So, we’ve taken a more ambitious approach to produce a very generalized XML editing platform. Using what we learned as the basis, our new editor is far more capable. Rather than relying on the mapping of XML into an equivalent HTML5 structure, we now directly use the XML facilities that are built into the browser. This approach is both far more robust and far more scalable. But the most exciting aspect is change tracking. We’re building change tracking directly into the basic editing engine – from the outset. This means that we can track all changes – whether the changes are in the text or in the structure. With all browsers now correctly implementing the standardized DOM Range model, our change tracking model has to be very sophisticated. While it’s hellishly complex, my experience in implementing change tracking technologies over many years is really coming in handy.
If you’ve used change tracking in XMetaL, you know the limitations of their technology. XMetaL’s range selection constrains how you can select which limits the flexibility of deletion. This simplifies the problem for the XMetaL customizer, but at a serious usability price. It’s one of the biggest limiting factors of XMetaL. We’re dealing with this problem once and for all with our new approach – providing a great way to implement legislative redlining.
Take a look at the totally contrived example on the left. It’s admittedly not a real example, it comes from my stress testing of the change tracking facilities. But look at what it does. The red text is a complex deletion that spans elements with little regard to the structure. In our editor, this was done with a single “delete” operation. Try and do this with XMetaL – it takes many operations and is a real struggle – even with change tracking turned off. In fact, even Microsoft Word’s handling of this is less than satisfactory, especially in more recent versions. Behind the scenes, the editor is using the model, derived from the schema, to control this deletion process to ensure that a valid document is the result.
If you’re particularly familiar with XMetal, you will notice something else too. That deletion cuts through the structure of a table!!!! XMetaL can only track changes within the text of table cells, not the structure. We’re making great strides towards proper legislative redlining technologies, and we are excited to work with our partners and clients to put them into practice.
