I realized I never responded to you on the XDI list, only on other lists.
For the tenth time this week, this is an awesome piece of work, and will move mountains when it comes to improving the comprehension of the XDI graph model.
After seeing others display XDI graphs with it on three calls this week, in the last hour I finally got the time to play with it myself. I totally love the tree layout and will be using it all the time! And being able to hover a node and see its full XDI
address is brilliant! And those are just two of the plethora of new features that make it so useful. In fact the feature set is getting to be just short of unbelievable!
By "just short", you can see what's coming ;-) Here are my new handful of feature requests. Please understand that these are motivated primarily by the decision we made on the XDI TC telecon today to use this graph editor for all of the visual XDI graph
diagrams in the XDI specs. I am SO PSYCHED about this because:
- We have found that for many people, seeing visual XDI graphs is the key to them "getting" the XDI graph model and pushing past the complexity of trying to learn the graph model by reading XDI statement syntax in the raw (either in display format or JSON).
- We will be able to add all the diagrams we need for illustrating many of the different common XDI patterns.
- The finer points of the graph model, such as the use of value nodes and literal nodes as we discussed on the TC call today, are MUCH easier to understand when looking at visual graphs.
- All of the examples will look consistent and use the correct visual graph notation because they are coming from the same tool.
Okay, so back to the feature requests:
- Right now you have the option to turn on and off Node Labels and Link Labels. However turning off Node Labels (which is my personal preference) also turns off display of literal values. Could you make Literal Values a third independent item you can turn
on and off? If you did that, I could turn off Node Labels and still see Link Labels and Literal Values. And others might want to just see Node Labels and Link Labels and turn off Literal Values (especially when they are long strings).
- Below is an example of what you get when you hover a literal node to get the "full address". There are two problems with this and two potential fixes:
- The literal node itself is not actually addressable. So the fix could be to just eliminate any address for a literal node and only show an expanded version of the literal value.
- If you were going to show the full XDI statement that defines that literal node, which you are almost doing now (and which I think is the best option), then the statement is just missing the forward slashes, i.e., it should be:
=alice<#tel>&/&/"+1-206-555-1212".
<image.png>
I believe that with these two changes, plus the ability to export SVG graphics that Joseph asked about today (and which it sounds like it already supports), then the graph editor will have everything we need to produce all the diagrams for the XDI specs.
Amazing!!!
Have a great weekend,
=Drummond