Hi Benjamin!
Il giorno ven, 25/11/2005 alle 19.01 +0100, Benjamin Burkard ha scritto:
Hi everybody,
I am looking for an open source XML-editor that hides the fact from the user that XML is actually being used. One more criterion is that it should be written in Java. Does anyone know of a tool like that?
This one matches your requisites:
Unfortunately it's still in alpha state and development seems to have slowed down recently, but admittedly I'm not subscribed to the developers' mailing list.
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What I am trying to do is to hide the fact that XML is being used from the user to make it more comfortable to use for historians.
I am not quite sure yet about how I am going to do it, but so far to me the best way seems to be using icons that have the name of the tag inside and either point to the right for a start tag or to the left for an end tag (the commercial editor XMetaL uses a similar syntax in one of its views). If the mouse points to either the start or the endtag the corresponding tag should change the color so that it's easier to find. Aside from that to the right of the textfield the corresponding attributes should be shown and made editable.
If anyone knows better ways or existing open source solutions I would be very happy to hear about it!
As Vex modify the WYSIWIG rendering on the basis of a plain CSS style sheet, it should be easy to customize it so that a specific visual rendering (background color, bold/italics, etc.) corresponds to a specific "semantic" tag.
As a second step of development it is planned to implement a versioning system that is able to show the differences between two XML-files - again without the user knowing that XML is being used.
No idea about this one, sorry.
Again, if anyone knows existing solutions to this problem I would be glad to know! If anybody is attempting to reach a similar goal I would be happy to collaborate!
I started preparing a CSS style sheet for TEI Lite some time ago, but put it aside because of some rendering problem in Vex' engine. The main developer is a very friendly guy, though, if the project is still under active development (and becomes stable enough, that also must be said) I would be interested in collaborating on this and possibly similar style sheets.
Ciao