The Dark Site - An Intelligent Web Environment
What is it?
The Dark Site is intended to become an integrated, intelligent environment for creating HTML-documents.
This version features intelligent, configurable syntax-styling (different fonts and colours for HTML-code), giving you a
good insight into your HTML-code.
The aim is to aid web-developers in HTML-coding as much and efficient as possible, without interfering and getting in your way.
Take a look at the planned features to get an idea of my vision:-)
I have many things in mind, but I am interested in your opinions, bug-reports and motivation -
your feedback will be appreciated
and answered, either personally, or on DarkSite's Webpage.
What is it not?
DarkSite is not intended to become a WYSIWYG-HTML-Editor like Dreamweaver or Pagemill/GoLive - there are several reasons for this:
- It would be very hard to code - I really don't have the time and manpower for this, better spend my time on other BeOS-projects, too...;)
- These editors are often not as intuitive to use as advertised - text-editors OTOH are very easy to handle - just type away..!
- They often produce code of questionable quality - automatically generated code will never reach the quality of manually
fine-tuned code, but bloating your HTML-code and slowing down the page-loading-time.
- the WYSIWYG is a fake: it only helps you when designing the webpage, but it will always differ from
a browser-rendered page - and this is all what counts in the end: how does it look in the real world?
Because of these issues, I decided to take another approach:
What You Code
Is What You Get
This will be the main concept in DarkSite: concentrate on XML/HTML, not the rendering - this will be done externally -
allow hands-on-the-code, but offer as much and as intelligent help as possible, thus bringing you all
the advantages of hand-coded HTML, without requiring you to do everything by hand without any help.
So in the next versions, I'll add some nice features and enhancements:
Planned Features
- Core Editor
- Syntax-Styler: proper comment-handling (did not made it in this version, sorry)
- intelligent Type-2-HTML: automatic conversion from special chars to entities and other HTML-code
- live HTML-Help, online lookup and Tag-completion
- Unlimited Undo (investigating...)
- intelligent inspectors for various HTML-Tags
- extensive, highly configurable Browser-Preview
- Toolbar for the most important Tags
- Intelligent Inspectors
- allowing you to "configure" the HTML-Tags... more info on this will be published as the development progresses.
- a Site-manager
- shows the structure of your site
- shows the relations of the site-elements
- later: FTP-support to synchronise with the online-version
Known Issues
- Freeze when resizing/overlapping window while syntax-styling
- in this version, syntax-styling is not as thread-safe as it probably should be.
You can safely enter text while your text is being styled (after loading or changing the settings), but when you
bring another window to the front while the view is still busy, it could lead to this bug.
This bug has also been encountered to empty views, sometimes, after changing prefs.
believe this bug is fixed in the next version, 0.5.5, which is currently under development. I have not been able to reproduce it with that version.
- Note: Beta-versions will be made available in the future, on
DarkSite's Webpage, before the final version is released.
Screenshots
To keep down the archive-size, I did not include the images here.
Please visit DarkSite's Webpage
to see DarkSite being debugged, and the prefs-panels.
Closing Words and Credits
I have created The Dark Site because of my own needs (selfish as I am;), and I am using it for my own web-work (also for this document, needless to say;),
so you can be sure I will try to keep it as bug-free as I can.
However, if you encounter problems or have ideas, only if you submit bug-reports and feedback, I can do something to make them a reality and improve the DarkSite !
Special Thanks must go to: