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[ANN] A new free XML editor that brings a fresh perspective to XMLwhites

• From: Philip Fearon <pgfearo@googlemail.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org, pgfearo@g...
• Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 16:15:49 +0100

I'm pleased to announce the first release of XMLQuire, a free
light-weight XML text Editor for Windows that introduces a new concept
to XML editing to improve both usability and whitespace management.

The main principle of this concept is that no tab or space characters
are inserted into XML for indentation. Instead, the editor handles all
formatting dynamically and continuosuly by altering the left-margin
for each line of text. Typically, XML files produced in this way are
25% smaller, but this was not a motive in development of this design:

This editor demonstrates that, without the editing latency imposed by
indentation characters, XML content can be restructured in any number
of ways whilst formatting (and therefore readability) is maintained
throughout: e.g. moving a containing element tag to include more child
elements within the containing element, results in the new child
elements being immediately indented to reflect this - there's no
'pretty-print' button to press.

Non-balanced XML is also formatted as you edit, so the indentation
pattern clearly show where element close tags are expected. Also,
word-wrap allows text to remain in view but with indentation
maintained for readability (a hanging-indent is used to differentiate
wrapped lines).

As touched on above, there are tangible usability benefits to this
concept; but the real problem addressed is that of maintaining the
integrity of XML content during the editing process. Unlike
conventional editors, XMLQuire does not need to modify indentation
characters throughout the editing session to maintain formatting,
there is therefore significantly less risk of unintentionally
modifying significant content, such as preformatted text found in
embedded scripts.

Aside from this new formatting, XMLQuire includes the standard XML
editor features such as schema validation and auto-completion. To keep
this tool simpler, XSLT, XPath and schema-design features have been
ommited; there's also currently a practical limit on file-size of
about 10,000 lines or 250KB (as tested on a 3 year old mid-range
laptop).

I hope you will try out XMLQuire, if only to experience the benefits
this alternative formatting could bring to the consistency of our XML
if other editors were to adopt this.

XMLQuire is a redistributable 3MB .exe file and requires no
installation on Windows versions later than XP (for Win-XP a .msi file
is available), it's available as a free, no-registration download,
from the XMLQuire web page at:

http://qutoric.com/xmlquire

Many thanks

Phil Fearon
Qutoric Limited

*A 'quire' is either a meaure of paper or a booklet - So, given the
tool's purpose, XMLQuire seemed like a natural name choice.