Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

[ANN] outline renderer for F6 HTML authoring

Author:Ian Beatty
Posted:3/25/1999; 5:38:03 AM
Topic:[ANN] outline renderer for F6 HTML authoring
Msg #:4469
Prev/Next:4468 / 4470

Announcement docRenderer() is an outline renderer for Frontier 6. The renderer's purpose is to allow easy authoring of document-style web pages in a Frontier outline, with minimal attention to HTML tags. For details and download, see
http://www-perg.phast.umass.edu/IDB/frontier/docRenderer/
Why? When I learned that Frontier 6 would allow wrapping arbitrary-length outline items, I thought "Whee! I'm going to write all my web pages as outlines!" (Or at least the prose-heavy document-style ones.) I'm an outline junkie: the ease with which they let me collapse, expand, and reorder is just too cool. And then I thought: I'd like to have Frontier figure out most of the HTML structuring of my document from my outline's hierarchy, so I don't have to put in all the paragraph tags, section titles, list item tags, etc. by hand. (Like a more powerful version of ClayCompatibility, for outlines.) What I really wanted was something more like Microsoft Word's outliner, but for HTML authoring via Frontier. A big difference between Frontier's outliner and MS Word's is that Frontier doesn't distinguish between headline and bodytext items. But if that distinction can be inferred from the structure of the outline, then Frontier's no-bodytext "limitation" isn't a problem. So I wrote an outline renderer and named it docRenderer() for "document renderer". It's geared for document-style pages which are mostly text and section/subsection/etc. headers, with some other stuff like lists and blockquotes. Other HTML is possible, but must be hand-coded. Thanks, UserLand, for wrapping outline headlines of unlimited length! Such a simple change, such a profound impact on my web authoring! Next on my wish list: a browser that supports dynamic client-side expanding/collapsing of list elements in an HTML document. -- Ian



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