WYSIWYG Editing of Your Own XML Schemas with Oxygen 9 Author Mode
From Aventine Solutions
The WYSIWYG editing view in the oXygen XML editor version 9, or Author Mode, is a brand new feature which was just finalized in the last week or so for 9.0 (beta testing was last month, October 2007).
This feature would be useful for users that are authoring content of XML files and a more friendly, "tag-less" editor would be desired. If you a are using your own XML schema for your business domain, then the trick is to create a CSS3 file that is associated with each XML document and dictates the look of this tagless editing. This is not trivial because it is a new feature to Oxygen and there's not a lot of great documentation. Some aspects of CSS3 are not supported on one hand and on the other, Oxygen had to fudge some things to get, for instance, inline display of graphics.
If this might be interesting to you, the first step is to watch two videos provided by oXygen demonstrating how well the Author Mode can work with DocBook and TEI schemas and templates (which are included in the standalone 9.0 installation for experimentation);
The second video gives an inkling to the power of this new feature, but how all these bells and whistles are implemented with your own XML schema, I don't have a clue yet.
However, I took a simple example, my bookmarks list XML, to get an idea what work is required to get this working. What is missing for me is how attributes of tags can be included in the WYSIWYG editing (although the TEI samples seems to show that this can be done), ao a future version of this example will hopefully include this aspect.
[edit] Bookmarks Example Files
- bookmarks.xsd the XML schema in W3C XSD format
- bookmarks-authormode.css the key WYSIWYG ingredient, a CSS3 file which tells oXygen how the editing should look
- bookmarks-sample.xml a sampling of bookmark data
- bookmarks2html.xsl an XSLT to transform bookmarks into an XHTML document
- bookmarks2opera.xsl for transforming the data into something that the Opera browser can import
- bookmarks2moz.xsl for importing into FireFox
- bookmarks2safari.xsl for importing into Safari
- build.xml an Ant build file for Java Developers and/or Eclipse users so that the transformations can be done using Ant
