xmlhack: Bag of new tools for editing XML in simple text form

XML has become more popular as an authoring format, and it brings with it the frustrating choice between typing tags ad nauseum, or adopting XML GUIs that may be too expensive, too buggy or too proprietary for preference. Numerous systems, formats and tools have sprung up to provide useful authoring formats for XML.

Arnold deVos announces Simple Outline XML (SOX), "an alternative syntax for XML. [SOX] is useful for reading and creating XML content in a text editor." SOX supports elements, attributes and text only right now. Arnold also announces http://www.langdale.com.au/styler/styler, a Java XMLReader class that reads SOX source and provides corresponding SAX events.

Scott Sweeney announces SLiP and SLIDE. SLiP ("Sorta Like Python") is a short hand syntax for XML that looks somewhat like Python source. SLIDE ("Sorta Like an IDE") is a lightweight Windows executable for editing the SLiP format. See the announcement for more details. Also see the rest of this thread for similar ideas developed by others.

Also see the following projects which are tailored as simple documentation formats that can be converted to XML:

StructuredTextNG, for which there is also a Wiki.
WikiText (used by most Wikis and the Linux Documentation Project)

Re: Bag of new tools for editing XML in simple text form (Tobias Lorenz - 12:35, 22 May 2002)

I personally like editing XML with JEdit. The XML-Plugin available allows very conveniant (IMHO) editing of XML, and it's not dedicated to any specified type of XML document. The available tree view already shows the attributes of the selected tag, and can be configured to show only the id attribute of the tag.

O.K., JEdit is not a lightweight editor, but it gave me some features i missed before using JEdit. I have not seen an editor with syntax highlighting for *.sh or *.bat files before.

Re: Bag of new tools for editing XML in simple text form (Jeff Lowery - 20:12, 13 May 2002)

I'd also recommend checking out Arachnophilia 5.0. Although it is designed to be an HTML editor, it is highly configurable.

For example, I easily added several XML Schema tags macros which can be inserted either through keyboard shortcuts or by double-clicking on the appropriate icon in the macro tree display at the left.

It also provides a simple Java class plug-in interface.

Re: Bag of new tools for editing XML in simple text form (Ian Stokes-Rees - 12:15, 13 May 2002)

vim and emacs have excellent tools which make XML editing very straight forward. The vim 6 text folding allows many XML documents to be expanded in a tree view similar to the IE view of XML documents. With the right XML settings you can have open/close tag matching (as with bracket matching) and functions which return your current path within the document.