InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
August 9, 1999
InternetView:XML For The Masses
By Jason Levitt
Vendors have little incentive to invest in crafting a good XML tool until all of this general standards confusion is cleared up. In fact, no one really knows what a desktop XML application should look like. But there are a couple of tools worth considering. One is SoftQuad Software Inc.'s Xmetal 1.0, a $495 scriptable XML editor that's relatively easy to use and comes with good documentation. Xmetal is a general-purpose XML editor that lets you edit an XML document in much the same fashion as WYSIWYG HTML editors. XML documents can be edited and viewed as raw XML, WYSIWYG (Xmetal uses cascading style sheets for WYSIWYG displays), and with matching tag markers in place, similar to Softquad's HotMetal Pro tag view option. Xmetal requires that you have a DTD for any document you edit, which seems a bit harsh considering that you can edit an XML document and check that it's well-formed without an accompanying DTD.
Another useful XML editor is Stilo Technology Ltd.'s WebWriter 1.0 ($395). It isn't as polished as Xmetal, but it offers the ability to build an XML document and accompanying DTD from scratch. For sites that need industrial strength Standard Generalized Markup Language and XML editing, Arbortext Inc.'s Adept Editor, an SGML editor that now has XML editing capabilities, is more complicated than these other offerings but has a lot of additional SGML editing features.
For knowledge workers who need a straightforward desktop editor for editing XML documents, Xmetal is the easiest to use among those I've seen so far. For more information about XML and these products, check out Seybold Publications' XML.com (www.xml.com) and the non-profit XML.Org (www.xml.org). Developers looking for more information should visit Datachannel's xDev Web site (xdev.datachannel.com).
Jason Levitt can be reached at jlevitt@cmp.com You can read his Internet Zone column on InformationWeek Online at www.informationweek.com/author/internet.htm
f you can figure out the direction that Extensible Markup Language standards are taking by perusing the World Wide Web Consortium's Web site (www.w3.org), you must have a full-time gig as an XML expert. It's confusing to me, and I actually spend time studying these pages as part of my job. Will XML documents continue to use Document Type Definitions to define their content? Or will these definitions be supplanted by the emerging XML Schema standard? Will XML documents be viewed using Cascading Style Sheets or the emerging Extensible Style Language standard (www.informationweek.com/736/36iujl.htm)? And what about that mess of banking and financial standards for data interchange using XML?
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