Thursday, April 12, 2007

Release the hounds!!!

My name is Hector, I am a student at UNAM majoring in Computer Science.
Since 2002 I have been following Mono development, then in 2003 I began sending patches for documentation of GTK#. In those years I was majoring in physics but reason took me in and I decided to switch my major to CS, unfortunately this brought my full attention to school so I stopped sending patches for mono.
Now years later, with more experience under the belt I decided to send an application for Google Summer of Code (SoC), after reading the ideas about implementing a WYSIWYG Editor for ECMA documentation.
From first experience I know how boring and tiring can be to edit XML directly:
  • You have to remember a bunch of tags and its rules
  • You have to validate every change of the document to catch any typo or missing tag, etc.
  • Even after some time and good memory you have to deal with bad typos that break the validity of the document or that change the semantic of the tag.
  • All the extra typing and/or copy/paste of tags (very error prone).
For a person that wants to add some remark or fix some typo it's too much to handle. So the need of a editor that hides all the XML and presents a more intuitive interface to the user is not only a nice idea is a necessity.
Thanks to Google, Mono and my mentor Mike Kestner, I will work this summer to implement this editor that will help lessen the learning curve to edit and create documentation for the Mono Project and with a bit of extra work be integrated to Monodevelop so developers can create and edit documentation for their own projects using this editor.