Re: Usability of XML editors

Steinar Bang wrote:
> Some of the nice things about conglomerate, was the things it got for
> free from libxml2.  One of these nice things, was the care libxml2 takes
> to not mess up the formatting of the original document.
> 
> The Java based XML editors I've seen, have not been very good at keeping
> to and keeping existing formatting.  So when I have to edit those same
> files later with emacs+nxml, things look really bad!

Almost all XML editors do this, unfortunately. Emacs/psgml inherits the
sanctity of irrelevant white-space in element-content from SGML, which
is optional in XML, but is detectable if you use a DTD (because you know
which content models are mixed-content and which are element-content).
Sadly, this has not been realized by the editor-makers.

It's a pain in both directions: if you create a document using
Emacs/psgml and then later open it using something else, the something
else preserves the irrelevant white-space in the formatting, which is
wrong; and if you create a document using something else and then later
open it in Emacs/psgml, there isn't any easy way to force it to the nice
indented model psgml and xxml use (unless someone has written a macro to
do this that I haven't found).

> The Java based editors also reformat the CDATA content and mixed content
> elements, which is _really_ bad, from a text/document editor POV.

Formatting CDATA content is an absolute no-no and means the editor is
broken. Reformatting mixed content is harmless, if sometimes inelegant.

///Peter