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Kelly Long
SoftQuad released version 1.0 of XMetaL in 1998. At that time,
it was the only dedicated XML editor on the market. Today
XMetaL offers a more intuitive product and a powerful set of
tools that can be used to create, edit, and save XML and SGML
content on par with Arbortext's much more expensive Adept
Editor.
Unfortunately, as is true with most XML editors, you still need
to have some knowledge of XML and the document structure to
work efficiently in XMetaL. The interface, although intuitive
with some knowledge of XML, does not look like Word or any
other popular word processor. The interface is divided into
three panes.
- a pane that illustrates the tree structure
- a pane with the content
- a pane that contains a list of elements or attributes allowed
in a document if you are authoring against a DTD
Document Views
XMetaL provides three views for authoring in the content pane.
- plain text
- tags-on
- normal
The plain text view shows the XML mark-up as if you were
working in a text editor. The tags-on view graphically
illustrates the beginning and end of elements with arrows. The
normal view allows you to edit and insert content without any
knowledge of the XML syntax. The normal view can be difficult
to author in when creating highly structured documents because
it is difficult to tell what element your insertion point is in
and therefore what other elements you can insert if you are
working against a DTD.
The tags-on view is a useful compromise between the normal view
and the expert plain text view. The tags-on view displays the
position of tags while retaining the layout of the page. The
structure view feature improves the usability of the product by
creating a structure similar to a Windows help file, which
simplifies navigation in a long document. Most users will find
that using a combination of all views is necessary to author
content.
Conclusion
Although XMetaL can be a powerful and inexpensive tool for
authoring XML content, it may not be the best tool for users
without some XML training. Intermediate to advanced XML users,
however, will find XMetaL to be intuitive and easy to use.
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