[OT] you tried xmlMind?

[Jeremy Quinn]

Dear All,

After a hard weeks work, I have finally got XMLMind working as a WYSIWYG XML editor for our site content. Furthermore it has been accepted by the client as the tool their content writers will use on their LAN.

It's a blinding piece of software!!

If you have not seen it, check it out! <http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/>

It uses a combination of it's own XML config, CSS and XSD/DTD to style XML and enforce Schema validated editing. We have managed to make editing views close enough (just) to the way they look in a browser. You can add GUI widgets to add/insert/convert appropriately, it is very adaptable, and has macros, custom commands and has a plugable API. CSS support is not as complete as I'd like, but there are some very useful extensions to it which come in handy for showing images, adding static meta info etc.

Being based on standards means we will be able to port the editing to other apps as they come along if we want to. I don't know of any other standalone Apps that work the same way as XMLMind (yet!), but most of the CSS and all of the XSD would be portable if you wanted to use Wyona or BitFlux, I imagine.

XMLMind has a free and paid-for version. The free version has the limitation that you can only edit documents that have a default namespace in the "http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/schema/*"; url space. No great hardship for us, though it could be a nuisance for some.

I am using it on MacOSX, where it is pretty buggy, but then I am having to use the Developer Preview v8 of Java 1.4.1 in which to run it. XMLMind acknowledge the problems and say they take the platform seriously ....


I have been waiting a long time to be able to work like this!

These types of editors are becoming a reality.

Maybe we should start contributing XSD etc. Schemas for the different Cocoon document namespaces, like SQLTransformer, SourceWritingTransformer etc. we are going to start needing them for editors ;)


regards Jeremy



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