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Introduction to iX-Guide
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Many months ago I was thinking of writing some useful
program for Amiga. I realized that I can do something on the field of
Amiga hypertext browsers. I didn't like the boring AmigaGuide documents
without possibility to include images inside document or to use different
fonts in the same node, so I decided to make my own hypertext language
and program to view that documents. The name of program was MagicGuide.
MagicGuide was MUI application and its hypertext language was very
complicated and not very usable. Then I got the e-mail from Goran Mitrovic
who suggested me why not to make MagicGuide's hypertext language compatible
with AmigaGuide and then just add new commands for inlined images, fonts etc.
I delayed the development for few months and then I started to write
completely new program which doesn't use MUI and which uses hypertext
language compatible with AmigaGuide. The iX-Guide was born...
iX-Guide is supposed to be an AmigaGuide replacement and enhacement
but it is more than that. iX-Guide is the program with ability to read
miscellaneous hypertext file formats and other files. It uses external
datatype libraries to view other file formats. This is the custom iX-Guide
datatype system which uses external libraries (called iX Datatypes) to
view miscellaneous formats. iX-Guide comes with two iX Datatypes -
HTML iX Datatype (for viewing HTML files) and C SOURCE
iX Datatype (for viewing C sources with coloring keywords, vars etc.).
There are also included sources of these two datatypes so user can make
his own datatypes. iX Datatypes are actually used only for translating
any other file format to IXML (iX Markup Language) format which is
the native file format of iX-Guide.
IXML is the hypertext markup language based on AmigaGuide
language. It supports most of the old AmigaGuide tags but it also offers
huge set of new and powerful tags which make documents to look even better
than HTML documents! The most important tags are tags for inlined images,
inlined animations, multiple fonts in one node, text coloring and styles,
text and image layout, document background etc.
Also, the very important thing is the AREXX interface with set
of functions for drawing into document so you can have very interactive
documents. You just specify the name of arexx program with @REXX command
and that program will be added to iX-Guide as iX-Guide arexx client which
can manipulate with document in almost endless ways. You can e.g. write
an arexx game which will user play inside document.
iX-Guide also gives user possibility to change
almost everything via prefs, from the fonts to be used inside document to the size
of retrace buffer. iX-Guide is still not fully functional but it is in
development and I hope it will come to the version 1.0 soon, especially now,
when I have a help in programming from T.T.T. from Tokyo :)
On this WWW pages in future you will be able to find
patches to iX-Guide versions uploaded to Aminet, misc. documentation,
new iX Datatypes etc.
Now download the latest version of iX-Guide if you haven't already and
enjoy... And don't forget to send me e-mail with possible bug reports
and/or suggestions.
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