Re: Syntax-driven editing (was RE: DTD formal syntax)

[Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@allegis.com>]

> From: Jim Mehl [mailto:mehl@ihot.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 8:47 PM
> To: xml-dev
> Subject: Re: DTD formal syntax
> [...]
> However for those of you I have confused let me try again. I want a
> program that reads a DTD, say
> <!ELEMENT Record (Field1, Field2) >
> <!ELEMENT Field1 (#PCDATA) >
> <!ELEMENT Field2 (#PCDATA) >
> parses it and then puts up a window/form/input screen/whatever
> that says what do you want for Field1. You say abc. It says what 
> do you want for Field2. You say def. The program then produces
> <Record>
> <Field1>abc</Field1>
> <Field2>def</Field2>
> </Record>
> Except, of course, I want it to deal with most any DTD. Like I said 
> XMLSpy (and probably others I am unaware of) provides this,
> but I want more control over the data entry format.

I believe XMLSpy has an API for developing custom forms. Have you
investigated that? XMetal has similar support, I believe. I haven't
investigated these in any depth myself, but I plan to do so because I have
interest in developing custom UIs for editing XML. I'm more interested in
XML Schema than DTDs myself, though, because we need the data-typing support
and are using XML for data rather than documents, at present.