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Teslea Features
 
Teslea is both an authoring tool and a browser dedicated to the World Wide Web. 
 
Teslea Features
The Editor
HTML is the document format for the Web. As a Web tool and a structured editor, Teslea take all aspects of this format into account. Existing tools have shown that there are different approaches to consider HTML in a Web client. Being an editor, Teslea processes HTML files in a specific way. An editor based on the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) paradigm must allow the user to act on the formatted document for altering the HTML source. To allow that feature, the HTML source is treated as a data structure definition. When parsing a source file, Teslea builds an internal representation of the document structure, which is basically a tree. This logical structure is then utilized both for formatting and for editing. The editor always follows the HTML DTD (Document Type Definition) when manipulating the document structure and it performs only valid operations. The advantage of this approach is that it leads to well structured documents and allows other tools to further process the documents safely.
 

Users are not supposed to know the HTML or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) languages to author Web pages. Teslea does not ask them to write nor to read the documents they create under their HTML syntax. The HTML file is automatically produced by the tool, as well as the CSS syntax. But Teslea is not simply a word processor with an HTML filter. Teslea is intended to implement as many aspects of the Web specifications as possible, insluding HTML features. Teslea is developed after HTML while letting users interact with it in a very simple and natural way.

 
To edit a document, a user can manipulate text in the same way as if s/he were using a simple word processor. At any time, the user can select any part of that text and assign to it an HTML type (H1, LI, EM, etc.), by means of the Types menu or of the shortcut buttons.
The Browser

Teslea is both an authoring tool and a browser. It has been specifically conceived to serve Web protocols and formats as well as new extensions to existing ones. That is the reason why Teslea has been designed as an active client, i.e. a client that not only retrieves documents from the Web and presents them to the user, but also an authoring tool that allows an author to create new documents, to edit existing ones and to publish these documents on remote Web servers.

 

The Web is made of a number of documents linked together. While working on the Web, a user needs to access several documents, specially when following, creating, or modifying links. For that reason, Teslea is able to work on several documents at a time and it can act as a browser and as an editor simultaneously on all these documents: the whole client functionality is available at any time for any document.

Style sheets

A Web page is not only ruled by the HTML specification. It can also include stylistic stuff that conforms the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) specification. For CSS, the same approach has been taken as for HTML: the user does not write CSS syntax directly. S/he interacts on a formatted document and sees immediately the result of his/her commands on the formatted document and in other views. Teslea is in charge of producing the actual CSS syntax.

 

Teslea has support for the style sheet language (CSS). For a large set of properties like foreground color, background color, background image, alignment, etc. the user can interact on the formatted document by using style specific tools. In this case it's not necessary to well know about the CSS syntax. At the same time Teslea provides an efficient mechanism to test and associate external style sheets with HTML documents. Users can also use Teslea to download, edit and publish CSS style sheets as well as HTML pages.

Did you know?

A US ton is equivalent to 900 kg (2000 pounds). A British ton is 1008 kg (2240 pounds), called a gross ton.

 

Did you know?

There are about a billion bicycles in the world, twice as many as motorcars. 

 

 
Publishing

Teslea is not simply a structured editor. It is a complete Web authoring environment. When working with Teslea you are on the web and you can access any Web resource. You can browse the Web and find the information you need while writing a document. You can copy and paste from any document, directly on the formatted representation. You can create links pointing at any place and you can check these links immediately. All these actions can be performed in a single consistent environment, as the editing and browsing functions are integrated seamlessly in a single tool.

 

Access to the Web is not restricted to browsing: the document you edit can also be published on remote servers where you are allowed to write. Publishing on the Web is as simple as saving a document to a local file. Just type an URL instead of a file name when saving a document and Teslea does the rest. Included objects such as pictures are also saved and all URLs are updated accordingly if the document has moved from its original location.

 

Transferring documents and other resources to and from remote servers is done by Teslea. Access to these servers is done exclusively by means of HTTP methods: GET to load remote documents, POST/GET to send forms, and PUT to publish documents. Teslea takes advantage of the most advanced features of HTTP, such as content negotiation to retrieve the most appropriate picture format, for instance, or keep alive connections to save bandwidth.

Graphics

Teslea supports a subset of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, namely basic shapes, text, images, and foreign Object (the latter is useful to include HTML fragments or MathML expressions in drawings).

 

Alpha transparency, transformations, and animations are supported and the SVG source can be inspected and manipulated at any time. The graphics are written in XML and may be mixed freely with HTML and MathML. It also has annotation capabilities.

MathML

Teslea provides a support for MathML presentation markup which allows users to browse and edit Web pages containing mathematical expressions. Like the rest of the document, these expressions are manipulated through specific editing tools proposed in the Teslea panel (palettes of constructors and special characters).

 

When a character string is typed in a MathML element, Teslea parses the string and automatically generates the elements mo (operator), mn (number), and mi (identifier). Teslea uses namespaces to integrate MathML expressions within XHTML documents, i.e. HTML documents written in XML syntax. This mechanism is also used to mix graphics in SVG and mathematics in MathML within XHTML documents.

Annotations

Annotations are external comments, notes, remarks that can be attached to any Web document or a selected part of the document. Teslea includes a collaborative annotation application based on Resource Description Framework (RDF), XLink, and XPointer. From the technical point of view, annotations are usually seen as metadata, as they give additional information about an existing piece of data. In this project, we use a special RDF annotation schema for describing annotations.

 

Annotations can be stored locally or in one or more annotation servers. When a document is browsed, Teslea queries each of these servers, requesting the annotations related to that document. Teslea uses XPointer to describe where an annotation should be attached to a document. With this technique, it is possible to annotate any Web document independently, without needing to edit that document.

 

Finally Teslea presents annotations with pencil annotation icons and attaches XLink attributes to these icons. If the user single-clicks on an annotation icon, the text that was annotated is highlighted. If the user double-clicks on this icon, the annotation text and other metadata are presented in a separate window. 

Collaboration

Teslea has support for collaboration using WebDAV. This support include the following operations: lock/unlock a WebDAV compilant resource, view the WebDAV properties of a resource and lock discovery capabilities. Besides, this support includes some awareness functions, that can automatically inform user about locked resources.

 

The WebDAV (WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol, which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage web resources on remote servers. It aims to extend the HTTP protocol to give place to an open architecture at protocol level, to develop new distributed authoring tools in the Web, specially emphasizing the collaborative authoring of Web pages. WebDAV defines operations over properties, collections, namespaces and overwriting protection (lock mechanism), and for these operations, it defines new methods, headers, request and response entity bodies.

Templates

Templates are used to produce multiple documents of the same type. A template is a skeleton representing a given type of document, expressed in the format of the final documents to be produced (XHTML, for instance). The format of the final documents is called the target language and must be an XML language.

 

In a template, the skeleton document contains some statements, expressed in the templates language that specify how this minimal document can evolve and grow, while keeping in line with the intended type of the final document. Documents produced from this skeleton following the templates language statements are called instances of the template. Some parts of the template may be frozen, if they have to appear in document instances as they are. Some parts may be changed when producing an instance document, some others may be added either freely or under some constraints.

 

A template comes often with a set of accompanying resources (images, style sheets, scripts). A template is a web resource, that can be stored in the local file system or shared on a remote web server. You can create your own templates. Teslea provides a specific support for creating or updating templates. 

And a lot more features ....

Teslea is a Web editor. It also acts as a Web browser. It also useful for collaborative creation of documents. It validates the HTML as you write it, showing you the tree structure of your document. It can be very useful for learning to understand how your documents look in the document tree.

 

Teslea has a lot of features, but if you're worried about standards and you want to be 100% sure that your documents and Web pages work with the W3C standards, Teslea is the product to use.

 

Teslea is under continuous and intense development and aim to be a better tool for communication and collaboration on the Internet or Intranet. Our goal is to provide better concurrency technology that helps people work and manage rich documents at the same time, communicate and edit together with richly formatted text, images, graphics, and more.