Re: [tlug] Syntax highlighting for XML Schema (XSD) files in XEmacs

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Charles Muller writes:

 > Josh Glover wrote:

 > > I wonder why there is no demand for this sort of thing?

Say's Law: Supply creates its own demand.  Ken Handa is (for practical
purposes) paid by the Japanese government to work about half-time
(maybe more) on GNU Emacs, so GNU Emacs works pretty darn well for
Mule in general and Japanese in particular.  That makes GNU Emacs a
more attractive platform for people who just want to get work done,
even though Emacs is basically 1970s technology in respect of
structured text processing---all the world's a regular language.
Balanced expressions?  What's dem?  How ironic!!  (XEmacs is no
better, although I'd like to fix that, and there are fewer constraints
to fixing it in XEmacs.  I think it would take a lot less work to do
it in the XEmacs project, but we have a lot^2 less labor available.)

Then there is also the huge political-correctness bias.  While XEmacs
is proof-of-concept that Emacs doesn't have to be a big-ball-of-mud
Microsoft-desktop-style-world-domination-now application, it's less
than halfway to the 21st century (even though it got a running start
in 1990!)  Not very attractive to people who believe in modular
applications.  On the other hand, people who actually like big-ball-
of-mud programming are by and large either Japanese or world-
domination-oriented software socialists[1], and they tend to support
GNU because, well, it's the free software center of gravity.

 > I think there is--and I would love to see XEmacs further develop its
 > XML functions. But most people I know who do serious textual work in XML
 > are using a combination of <oXygen/> and TEI-Emacs. Unfortunately,
 > TEI-Emacs only works with GNU Emacs, but you want to might want to
 > download it and look at the code. Of course nxml, psgml, xslt-process,
 > etc, are included in this package.

I took a look at nXML-mode, and basically it depends on an interface
in fontlock that XEmacs doesn't have.  It probably would be possible
to emulate it pretty cheaply, because nXML-mode basically takes over,
leaving nothing for GNU Emacs to do.  But this takes more time than I
have this week.

If anybody is interested in actually doing work to support XEmacs
improvements in this area, I'm willing to trade code for almost
anything: documentation, sysadmin work (eg, ML admin/moderation), etc.
(I wish I could include bug-reporting in that list, but we've already
got plenty of reports; it's freeing up time to do something about them
that is needed now.)

Footnotes: 
[1]  I am *still* not making this up.<wink>