xml

These days I’m doing some Asterisk work, creating AEL dial plan scripts for call center agents: Logging in and out, checking if the hotlines are staffed before allowing a pause, logging agent events to a separate logfile. For the scripts I’m using my favourite cross-platform editor jEdit. At the moment, jEdit has no syntax highlighting for AEL files, so I put one together myself. For a while, the file was hosted on snippets.

When developing XSL-FO stylesheets sooner or later you will see something that doesn’t look as intended: It has the wrong margin, padding, line height, floats in the wrong place, etc. If you have no visual debugging tool, the quickest way to check for errors is setting a border or background attribute on the element in question. <curmudgeon>Just like we debugged web layouts in 1999! We had nothing like that fancy Firebug plugin, just our trusty notepad and bare HTML!