RE: Open Source XML Editor

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Danny Ayers wrote:

> Hi,
> Interesting article - I got OpenOffice a while ago, but hadn't got around to
> looking at the XML.
> I can see the use for knocking out presentable documents, maybe I'm missing
> something, but it does seem rather a rather limited & hard-work approach :
> type in your data, using formatting to differentiate between elements, run
> it through a transform - ok so far. But then for every edit, you have to
> return to the original source doc, save and transform it again. Also, it's a
> one way process - unless you write a transform to convert other docs into
> something OpenOffice understands. Hardly WYSIWYG, even if you do limit
> yourself to defined styles. In the article you suggest things you can do
> using OpenOffice and AxKit - I'm not familiar with AxKit but you mention
> that it's a WYSIWYG XML editor, so surely if you have that, it defeats the
> object of using OO? Why not just pick up a cheap purpose-built XML editor? -
> e.g. I've seen good reports on the shareware XMLWriter (www.xmlwriter.net I
> think).
> Good article though, all the same ;-)

AxKit is a server side XML App server for Apache that does XML
transformations (and more). It depends what your needs are, but for me, I
wanted something where I could generate content for my web sites, and my
customers want that too, but in a WYSIWYG type tool. And open source. And
works on *Linux* (the last point is key for a lot of people).

Yes there is the issue of a two way process if you feel the need to edit
the transformed document (I didn't have time to raise that issue much in
the article). But its not a huge leap to be able to take a template and
re-generate an SXW file again from that. But I have no need for that right
now - I don't transform statically, I transform dynamically, so I never
have a copy of that file to edit.

"XMLwriter is a powerful XML editor for Windows..." - no good for me. I
haven't rebooted in 250+ days :-)

-- 
<Matt/>

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