Morphon has announced the release of the latest (3.1) version of their proprietary XML-Editor and bundled CSS-Editor as a free-of-charge/no-cost product.

XML-Editor is a document-oriented WYSIWYG validating XML editor (cross-platform/Java-based) that, prior to this release, came with a US$150 price tag. It has some fairly powerful features, including:

• full CSS support for control over onscreen formatting
• full Unicode 3.0, UTF-8, and UTF-16 support
• support for XML namespaces
• regular-expression searching (though not regular-expression search-and-replace)
• drag and drop (structures as well as text)
• XML Catalog and OASIS Open/SGML Catalog support
• remote editing (integrated HTTP/FTP upload/download)

A ChangeLog at the Morphon site documents changes added for this release and all past releases.

On the down side, "fast" and "snappy" are not words that come to mind when working with XML-Editor. It's a Swing-based application that has some fairly noticeable performance limitations.

Users looking for a fast, relatively low-cost WYSIWYG validating editor that's also multi-platform should take some time to evaluate epcEdit, which also comes with a powerful set of features (including graphical table-editing and full regular-expression search-and-replace support -- extract-matching backreferences, even). It's currently priced at US$99 for a single academic or "private use" license, US$349 otherwise.