Fluid site up, E-Tools Screenshots available

[Fast Learner]

Whenever you're dealing with HTML of that complexity, hand editing (or at least hand editing alone) becomes very difficult, especially if you didn't write it yourself.

Needless to say, though, you can still edit it with Notepad or whatever you'd like; it just requires a bit of source formatting to make it easier to read (there are many tools out there that reformat HTML, including Dreamweaver).

I've put up the page with some source formatting applied, just for perusal by you Notepad users. When you see it I think you'll agree that it's not that bad:

http://www.users.qwest.net/~mfrederick/Temp/GnollFormatted.htm
(and View Source, of course)

(PS: Dreamweaver is also a pure HTML editor, but with great automatic coloring, source formatting, excellent error checking, and all kinds of other goodies. If you're a hand-coding purist and haven't at least tried Dreamweaver, download the demo and see what I mean. Not a commercial endorsement, just the opinion of a guy who's been hand-coding since 1993. Yes, pre-Mosaic.)

 

[Simplicity]

Damn you, "tools not toys" faction!

I was hoping that E-tools would have PCGen thoroughly
beaten on the GUI-side. But, E-tools turns out just to
use windows dialogs with some funky colors. Whatever.
E-tool's layout is superior to the last version of PCGen that
I've seen... but it's not exactly hard to rearrange windows
dialogs (assuming PCGen was coded right).

The HTML printout looks cool, though. I'll probably still
buy it.

 

[Luke]

HTML reports

All I know is I got excited when I saw that html printout. Unfortunately, it's all static (non editable). Not too much of a problem though, it's easily addressed through inputs. I may have to do something about this.

Time to write a few emails to the developers...

Well, it's not meant to be editable. It's meant to be a reflection of the creatures stats as they appear in the program itself. To make changes, you modify the creature in the program - not edit the HTML.

There are blank sections left where you can modify the changing in-game stats (hit point damage, changing ability modifiers etc).

If you were actually wondering about how to edit the format and appearance of the HTML (as opposed to the stats themselves), you may be in for a bit of a challenge.
Early indications were that xml is exported, and you get the HTML from that. This almost always means that an XSL file is included to actually produce the HTML from the XML file.

- The good news is that you can modify the HTML output by modifying the standard XSL file. The XML file is pure data, and the XSL file provides the HTML generation to create something readable, using the actual data from the XML file as required.

- The bad news is that if you thought editing an HTML file had it's challenges, you're likely to find editing an XSL file completely mind-bending. Even the best XSL editors I could find failed to make the editing process anything like straight-forward.

- Eric Noah mentioned a while ago that Internet Explorer 6.0 or later was a requirement, for some reason. My guess would be because it's from this point that Internet Explorer becomes capable of displaying HTML reports from an XML/XSL combination.

- As an aside, I initially tried the XSL/XML reporting as a solution for my own RolePlayingMaster program. Not only was it going to be too difficult for people to create their own reports, than using a more familiar HTML report with embedded scripting (RPM script), but Internet Explorer also suffered very badly when processing very large reports (such as a complete Races report). Like anything, there's pros and cons.

Then again, this is nothing more than decent guessing about how these reports work. We'll just have to wait and see...

 

[MJEggertson]

I was actually excited because my program uses html documents as templates for character sheets. It is not however, a character generator. So, I could imagine generating the character in E-Tools, then importing it into my program to be more easily editable, where one could tweak their heart's content, and apply as many house rules as they wish.

I'm also excited about the xml documents. Unfortunately, my knowledge of xml is limited to only knowing that the format exists. I've got to do a little digging on that.

 

[MJEggertson]

I've put up the page with some source formatting applied, just for perusal by you Notepad users. When you see it I think you'll agree that it's not that bad:

http://www.users.qwest.net/~mfrederick/Temp/GnollFormatted.htm
(and View Source, of course)

Heh, beat me too it. It's like the original file was meant to be unreadable. 200 kB in less than 20 lines or so.

 

[Anubuss]

Well this isn't exactly in line with the other questions here, but...
Does anyone know whether or not e-tools has different building materials for weapons and armour, etc. Mithral and Adamantite are in the 3 Core books so are they available in e-tools, and what about adding new materials like those in Magic of Faerun? I've looked everywhere I can think of and haven't found any mention of this at all.

 

[Christian]

Whenever you're dealing with HTML of that complexity, hand editing (or at least hand editing alone) becomes very difficult, especially if you didn't write it yourself.

Yeah, well, I program in machine code, too. None of this fancy 'assembly language' for me!

I've put up the page with some source formatting applied, just for perusal by you Notepad users. When you see it I think you'll agree that it's not that bad:

[serious]I take it you're saying that was cleaned up with DreamWeaver? Not bad ... not a lot of garbage left behind.

If you're a hand-coding purist and haven't at least tried Dreamweaver, download the demo and see what I mean. Not a commercial endorsement, just the opinion of a guy who's been hand-coding since 1993. Yes, pre-Mosaic.)

I was engaging in parody with my comment ... I don't know of anyone who would try to code something like that by hand. Haven't seen DreamWeaver myself-may have to take a look.

But I could swear I'd seen Mosaic by late 1992/early 1993. I was at the U of Illinois then, though, so that could have been a beta. (And my first reaction was that the WWW would never replace FTP as a method for file sharing. Shows you what I know ...)

 

[Fast Learner]

Incredibly OT, but I Cannot Resist

I was engaging in parody with my comment ... I don't know of anyone who would try to code something like that by hand. Haven't seen DreamWeaver myself-may have to take a look.

But I could swear I'd seen Mosaic by late 1992/early 1993. I was at the U of Illinois then, though, so that could have been a beta. (And my first reaction was that the WWW would never replace FTP as a method for file sharing. Shows you what I know ...)

Gotcha. Some people are still intense HTML purists who would rather code something like that in Notepad. But they are sad.

As for Mosiac, the first release was Feb of '93 and it went to version 1.0 in November of '93. I remember thinking how cool the .9 Beta was. I was ecstatic -- pictures and text, together at last!

 

[MJEggertson]

Re: Incredibly OT, but I Cannot Resist

Gotcha. Some people are still intense HTML purists who would rather code something like that in Notepad. But they are sad.

Just a matter of perspective, really. I dislike struggling with user interfaces, or trying to 'trick' the program into doing what I want. I've coded similar looking documents in (a tweaked up version of) notepad. I know my html cold, so coding by hand allows me to know exactly what's happening under the hood, and it's actually quite efficient.

150 kB later, my document validates, save for maybe a few typos that are easily tracked down.

That said, I haven't tried a WYSIWYG editor in several years. I tried a while ago, but gave up because I found trying to use it was more difficult than just coding by hand.

 

[Christian]

Re: Incredibly OT, but I Cannot Resist

As for Mosiac, the first release was Feb of '93 and it went to version 1.0 in November of '93. I remember thinking how cool the .9 Beta was. I was ecstatic -- pictures and text, together at last!

Yep, that must have been it-spring of '93 sounds about right, 'cause I left grad school there in '94 & it had been around for a while then ... I wish I'd picked up on the potential early, probably coulda been one o' them 'web pioneers' & collected a fortune to cash out before the big e-business crash. But hindsight is 20-20.