Re: [announce] XMLSPY 2004 available, introducing MAPF

On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 14:56, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> XMLSpy must cost a ridiculously large amount, since not only does 
> Altova not bother to include the price in its announcement. It 
> doesn't include it on the web site, and won't even let you look at 
> the price before putting it in the shopping cart. And of course, the 
> shopping cart doesn't work, so you can't even see the price that way.

There's a lot of broken shopping-cart software out there which
companies are unaware of.

> This is deceptive and dishonest. I don't object to people charging 
> for software, but I very much object to companies trying to hide 
> their pricing or charging different users different prices depending 
> on what they think they can get away with.

I'm heartened to see that at least one person thinks this.

I revisited XML Spy recently (a co-worker was using it and I was
looking over her shoulder to see if it had changed much since I
last looked at it) and I was not hugely impressed. I believe it
is regarded as expensive but not ridiculously expensive. The
editor for XSLT is rather primitive, and the editor for document
instances appears to be unable to use the XSLT in real time for
formatting (but I may have missed something here), so there is
no synchronous WYSIWYG view. There doesn't appear to be any built-in
way to keep your files updated to a Web server, and it crashes on
long (>10Mb) documents (XP may of course be partly responsible).
The best thing used to be the iconic view of DTD/Schema construction,
and this seems to be still there. 

I'm going to be including it in a large and much more formal review
of XML software next year, so if anyone has specific peeves about
it (or other software) that they would like examined, please mail
me.

///Peter



 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list