Thanks, Hussein! I also received an email from Don Day (of OASIS' DITA committee) about my similar posting on your public message board. He had this to say about your product and DITA:
"XXE is capable of editing the various core DITA DTDs/Schemas, but you will have to create a config file to support them within XXE in the same way as other Schemas are supported. The CSS files in the DITA Open Toolkit without "classed" in their filenames will support most of the DITA elements in XXE (topic-alt tries to accomodate XXE's alternate list support, but it still imports CSS syntax that XXE does not handle, so it shows many error messages at the moment). The DTDs work in Standard Edition--I had verified that a few years ago, but I do not know how the Schemas, which are structured to support the specialization design pattern, would work in XXE Professional. There are two specific DITA behaviors that XXE cannot do (as far as I know from testing several years ago): Specialization awareness: XXE does not support the use of defaulted values of the class attribute as CSS selectors, therefore any new specialization cannot fall back to previous stylesheets--you have to create a new one, import the stylesheet for the previous Schema in the derivation, and then apply any special support for your delta elements in the new schema. conref awareness: XXE is fully XInclude enabled. DITA, however, was designed around XSLT as the primary processing architecture, and utilizes its document() function to support content referencing in a much more constrained manner. XXE being a source tree editor primarily will not effect this transform-oriented form of transclusion. I suspect that you can write Java to convert a content reference into an XInclude directive and thus feed the expected syntax to XXE for a preview mode, but that is not out-of-the-box." It sounds like he tried your editor several years ago, so I'm not sure if his info is still up-to-date. Can you comment at all on his comments? Regards, Mark Fletcher -----Original Message----- From: Hussein Shafie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 1:40 AM To: Mark Fletcher Cc: xmleditor-support at xmlmind.com Subject: Re: [XXE] I LOVE your editor! Mark Fletcher wrote: > I've been searching around for a week trying to find a good WYSIWYG > XML editor and I think I've just found the best! I have a few questions... Many thanks for these nice compliments. We are also convinced that many people happen to *hate* our XML editor, even if they are polite enough not to write it. > I assume your Professional edition version has FULL schema support? Yes, full. > Including modularization, redefine, etc.? Yes, *really* full. (We also fully support RELAX NG.) > I'm particularly interested in DITA support. Do you know of any reason > why your tool might not support DITA? No. > Is it at all possible to evaluate a Professional version? I have a > schema that I'd like to test it with. I'll sign whatever you like in > terms of not redistributing, or whatever. No. See http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/user_faq.html#try_pro_edition > I like the look of your Docbook demo. How is onscreen styling > controlled? CSS? How difficult is it to create a stylesheet for a new > schema? Yes, CSS. Writing a CSS is intrinsically not difficult. However it could take a long time if, like with DocBook, you have to style several hundreds of elements and also to write one or more tests for each styled element. > Do you have any options to view the actual XML text? No. There is just a (rather crude, 2-line long) macro which opens the document being edited in your favorite text editor and automatically reopens it in XXE if you have modified this document. The reason for that ``shortcoming'' is that we still don't understand why one would want to see the actual XML text. > Anything tricky about hooking this up to a CMS? It depends on the CMS. If your CMS supports WebDAV, there is nothing special to do (examples: Subversion=Apache+mod_dav+mod_svn, SiberLogic). If this is not sufficient, given the extensibility of XMLmind XML Editor, its comprehensive, documented, APIs, its tutorials for the developers, etc, we don't see what you can't do with it (if you really want to do it).
