XML Editor - Graphical Editors

Graphical Editors

Graphical editors based on GUIs may be easier for some people to use than text editors, and may not require knowledge of XML syntax. These are often called WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editors, but not all of them are WYSIWYG: graphical XML editors can be WYSIWYG when they try to display the final rendering or WYSIWYM ("What You See Is What You Mean") when they try to display the actual meaning of XML elements. When they are not WYSIWYG, they do not display the (or one of the) graphical end result of a document, but instead focus on conveying the meaning of the text. They use DTDs or XML schemas and/or configuration files to map XML elements to graphical components.

These kinds of editors are generally more useful for XML languages for data rather than for storing documents. Documents tend to be fairly free-form in structure, which tends to defy the generally rigid nature of many graphical editors.

In the above example, the editor is using a configuration file to know that the TABLE element represents a table, the TR element represents a row of the table, and the TD element represents a cell of the table. It is using this information to display the table based on this structuring information, in order to make editing easier.

Schema and configuration files information can also be used to ensure that users do not create invalid documents. For instance, in a text editor, it is possible to create a row with too many cells in the table, while this would not be possible with the above graphical user interface.