[plug] Whats a good xml editor for linux?

[Ben New]

Derek Fountain wrote:

>>>Actually, it seems you do understand the reasoning! Think of
>>>OpenOffice as an XML editor - that's exactly what it is.
>>>      
>>>
>>No it isn't an XML editor.
>>    
>>
>
>Open a new document in OOo. Write some text and save it in native OOo format. 
>Go to the disk and look at the file (unzipping it first). XML, right? Now 
>load it back into OOo and edit the document. Save it again and go and have 
>another look. Still XML, but now it's changed. You edited the XML using OOo.
>
>OOo is an XML editor.
>  
>

I think there needs to be a distinction here between "an XML editor" and 
"software that will allow XML files to be edited".

If OOo is an XML editor, then so is Sodipodi, Dreamweaver MX, JBoss and 
a bunch of other stuff that happen to use one or more particular forms 
of XML as a storage solution.  There are many many more examples of 
software that use XML to represent their data - they are not all XML 
editors, though, even though they allow *some types* of XML data to be 
edited.

An XML editor, afai understand it, is something that allows direct 
manipulation of *any* XML data, regardless of the DTD it uses.  
Generally this is done with a split pane showing the nodes in the tree 
structure on one side and the attributes and text contents of the 
selected node(s) on the other side.  Although I'm sure there are other 
UI paradigms out there, for those people who still think keyboards are a 
neat idea.

Getting back to Sodipodi, which is an example I know quite well, it 
happens to *contain* an XML editor (popup > Dialogs > XML Editor), but 
it, in itself, could not be seriously categorised as an XML editor, even 
though Derek's experiment would "work" with Sodipodi just as well as it 
does with OOo.

That is IMHO, anyway.  Although maybe Simon Scott's response is better ;-)

Regards,
Ben

-- 
Ben New
ben at leftclick.com.au

Leftclick Software Development
http://www.leftclick.com.au/