XML Editors

From DM

Contents 1 Why have a specialized editor? 2 Types of editors 3 Choosing an editor 4 Other sources of information

Why have a specialized editor?

XML is a text-based format and does not need any specialized editors: it can be used in any standard text editor. However, because XML uses Structural encoding to delineate the various structural components of the text, having a specialised XML editor might be useful.

Types of editors

Text Editors purporting to be XML Editors tend to come in 3 types:

• Those editors which hide the markup from you entirely
• Those editors which can switch between a 'code' view and a 'rendered' view of some sort
• Those editors which allow you to work directly with the markup

As the complexity of the document you are encoding increases, so proportionally do the possible benefits of using an editor which allows you to work directly with the markup. It is well worth the time invested learning the fundamentals of XML rather than try to hide it from view, as it will improve the quality of your markup -- and thus what you can do with the document -- significantly.

Choosing an editor

This can be difficult as choice of editor often comes down to personal preferences of working environment. Some well-known editors include

• Emacs -- Emacs is an extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. It is entirely text-based, but can be extended through the addition of Emacs Lisp scripts. It is used by many for all their editing needs, whether writing software code, editing text, or reading their mail. It has a specialised XML mode through the use of nXML which allows continuous validation of a document's Schema and context-sensitive tag and attribute completion. Those using TEI XML may prefer TEI-Emacs, a version of emacs customized specifically for TEI markup. It is cross-platform, opensource, and community-programmed.
• Open XML Editor -- The Open XML Editor is a freely available (open-source) text-based XML editor for Windows operating systems. It includes an XML wellformedness tester and DTD validator.
• oXygen -- oXygen is a commercial GUI XML editor that is written in Java, so it is cross platform.
• Add more editors here!

Other sources of information

• AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) Literature, Languages and Linguistics (hosted by the OTA) has published an Information Paper on XML editors. The article is based on a study by Thijs van den Broek, Benchmarking XML editors, undertaken in 2004. The evaluation includes results of the survey van den Broek undertook via the TEI website.
• Lars Marius Garshol's List of free XML tools and software