Re: Comercial XML editor recommendations

Michael Leventhal (michael@textscience.com)
Wed, 18 Jun 1997 22:07:14 -0700

Grif has announced that it will have XML-related extensions in the next
release of our HTML editor Symposia Pro and Symposia Doc+ at the end
of this month. While Symposia is a commercial-grade product the XML
extensions are primarily designed to give our customers the opportunity
to begin experimenting with XML. Our hope is that this will help to
give a larger audience a concrete idea of what XML is all about.
We have chosen to introduce XML in an HTML product in the same spirit,
we think, with which Yuri Rubinsky introduced SGML to HTML users in his
book "SGML on the Web". And in the spirit of the undertaking we
cordially invite your comments on the proposed XML extensions to our
product.

1. Read, either off the Web or locally, edit, and create well-formed
XML documents. The DTD, if present, is not read.

The document should use the ASCII character set and HTML
character entities. UTF-8 encodings above 127 will be preserved
but may not display correctly.

2. Save a document either as XML or HTML format with respect to
the syntax of empty tags and other syntactical differences.
Both types of saved documents will be ASCII with HTML character
entities except that UTF-8 encodings that were present in the text
as it was read in will be unchanged.

Note that nothing prevents the user from mixing HTML and XML,
as is currently done in many applications already on the Web.
But the user must decide which one it is when the document
is saved.

3. Create new element and attribute definitions. These are
"definitions" in the simple syntax implied by the concept
of "well-formedness", not DTD fragments. These definitions
may be saved in project folders and used in documents at
will.

4. Add new XML elements and attributes, either from a set
stored in a project folder or ad-hoc.

5. Create CSS stylesheets, and CSS definitions for any element,
HTML or XML. Symposia uses CSS as its own stylesheet language
and will display XML CSS specifications correctly. In effect,
it is an XML browser for the Web, albeit without certain
functionality such as JavaScript interpretation.

We have decided not to offer XML-LINK in this version even though
we have completed an early implementation.

Michael Leventhal
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Leventhal Internet : http://www.grif.fr
G R I F , S. A. Email : Michael.Leventhal@grif.fr
VP, Technology Telephone : 510-444-2962
1800 Lake Shore Ave Ste 14 Fax : 510-444-1672
Oakland, California 94606 France : (011) 33 1 30121430 (fr US)
______________________________________________________________________