SLiP FAQ (since it's so new, more like infrequently)

General Questions

What is SLiP?

SLiP is a shorthand format for XML. For more information, read this.

Syntax Questions

Escaping?

You can escape special characters in SLiP formats with either Python escape sequences or XML escape sequences.

Whitespace?

In XML2SLiP conversions, the only whitespace that is kept in the SLiP files is where the text inbetween elements has at least one non-whitespace character.

In SLiP2XML conversions, only whitespace that is inside of the quotations is included.

Empty Elements?

You can distinguish between empty XML elements <foo /> and empty XML sets <foo></foo> from SLiP.
• <foo /> can be written as ...

  foo:

• <foo></foo> can be written using an empty string ...

  foo: ""

Encodings Questions

What is supported?

0.2 is the first release with support for encodings other than ASCII for both XML and SLiP files. All processing is done with Unicode, so any locale could theoretically work eventually, but may not be supported yet.

For XML files, ASCII files, UTF-8 files, and files that declare their encodings in the XML declaration should work fine (if the encoding is also supported in Python's encodings package). Non-ASCII tag names don't work so well yet, though.

For SLiP files, ASCII and UTF-8 files are the only ones supported right now, but other encodings in the future shouldn't be that difficult. Ditto about Non-ASCII tag names.

SLIDE/UI Questions

How does SLIDE work?

SLIDE is an interface that is run from the terminal. It handles the opening, saving, and editing of document instances and their associated XML and SLiP versions. The actual editing and previewing of these documents is handed off to the editor and previewer apps of your choice. SLIDE acts as a launcher in these cases, having your editor or viewer open up a temporary file with the current document's content. When you are done editing or viewing the document, just save the edits to it's existing location, and close the app. Control should be returned to the SLIDE terminal window.

How do I change the editor or viewer?

To change the editor or viewer of choice, you may do so through the SLIDE options. After selecting the change option, it will ask you for the command to the editor/viewer. This should be a command that open the editor with the temporary file location appended to the end of the command. So for example, if I were to change my editor to Wordpad, I would enter the following command,

wordpad

So now when I choose to edit the file, it will execute this command:

wordpad c:\location\of\temp.slp

Windows users should use caution if the path to the application has spaces in it. If this is the case, be sure to put quotes around the command like this:

"c:\Program Files\word.exe"

Also, if the program requires a special option to open files, just place the option in the command. SLIDE just takes whatever command you pass it and appends the location of the temporary file to the end of it. So if you wanted to use Python's IDLE as the editor, just enter this as your command:

C:\Python21\Tools\idle\idle.pyw -f