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                              Hypertext Editing

I've been thinking about a response Mark [1] made to the entry yesterday [2]
about editing HTML (HyperText Markup Language). He suggested two possible
editors—the Mozilla Composer [3], which is scriptable with XPCOM (Cross
Platform Component Object Model) [4], or EMACS (Editing MACroS) [5], the
Microsoft Office of Unix editors (only programmable). It's a possible
starting point for a decent HTML editor, but I know next to nothing about
programming either one.

What I do know is that I'm not a fan of EMACS (Editing MACroS). The default
key bindings (“Escape Meta Alt Control Shift”) are horrible (rumored to cause
its author RMS Carpel Tunnel Syndrome), and at 710,000 lines of code (66% in
Lisp, 33% in ANSI C, 1% miscellaneous as reported by SLOCCount [6]) it's
quite the resource hog (“Eighty Megs And Constantly Swapping”) and my Lispfoo
isn't all that strong (“What do you mean than 2 isn't necessarily equal to 2?
What's up with that?”) so it would be tough going for me to use EMACS.

That leaves the Mozilla Composer and XPCOM (Cross Platform Component Object
Model), which is C++, and my C++foo isn't all that strong either, and I
haven't done any GUI (Graphical User Interface) work in years (and that was
mostly under Windows 3.x, the Amiga and Xlib [7], which is about as low as
you can get under X Windows [8]) so that route would be very tough for me as
well.

Which begs the question as to how the stuff I mentioned yesturday should
work. This is about the fourth revision to this entry I've done so far, and
it's been constantly switching between the editor (joe [9], at 19,000 lines
of C code—hmmm … wonder if it'd be easier starting with joe) and browser
(Mozilla, which is easily over a million lines of code), doing various
searches and loading of pages to gather all the information for this entry
(which so far has taken over an hour to write).

And you can see that I lost my train of thought there as I was doing research
and marking up this entry.

Sigh.

[1] http://grumpy.conman.org/
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/11/19.1
[3] http://www.mozilla.org/editor/
[4] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/
[5] http://www.gnu.org/directory/GNU/emacs.html
[6] http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/
[7] http://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib-tutorial/
[8] http://www.x.org/
[9] http://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/

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