open source XML-editor? - dm-l

25 Nov 2005


      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?
To give some background on the project I am working on:
I am building a system which shall allow for collaboratively working on 
Medieval Charters via a simple web browser.
Working on the charters does not only include creating transcriptions of 
the images of the charters (with a divided screen where the image is in 
the upper and the text field in the lower part of the browser), but the 
system also aims at allowing the tagging  of the text with semantic markup.
Just to give one example:
Printed charter editions normally present normalized versions of the 
text that facilitate a content-orientated, fast reading. For some groups 
of researchers, however, the focus in dealing with charters is not on 
their readability. For linguists, for example, an edition should be as 
close as possible to the original source. To exemplify this, the 
prototype offers an option to resolve abbreviations, while at the same 
time another text layer is preserved containing the exact spelling of 
the original.
Other elements include persons, places, certain structural parts of the 
charter such as the "inscriptio", "intitulatio" etc...
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 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.
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!
Thank you for any advice, comments, offers to collaborate!
Ben Burkard
- University of Cologne, Germany