Heavy into XMetaL
By Dale Dougherty
Many Web developers see themselves as coders rather than as page authors. They write code, run it in a browser, and then modify it when problems arise. Despite WYSIWYG alternatives, it was hard to beat a text editor such as Emacs, long revered by programmers as well as many tech writers. Emacs could be customized for specific applications and for coding in programming languages, like C or Perl, or markup languages, like LaTeX or SGML (see also "Yuri's Legacy"). This is because Emacs itself is programmable, which lets the coder be more productive by building tools for editing.
XMetaL, a new XML editor from SoftQuad, looks like a cross between a visual development environment and a word processor. Because it's highly programmable, XMetaL can become almost any kind of editor you want, maybe even an editor for people who don't care much about XML coding. You can customize XMetaL to create a complex and powerful editing environment that can be integrated into publishing and information-management applications.
Like its sister product, HoTMetaL, an HMTL-only editor, XMetaL provides three distinct views of a document: First there's a plain-text view, similar to the way you might view a document in Allaire HomeSite. There's also a Normal, or display, view in which the markup is hidden from view and the elements are formatted based on instructions in a style sheet -- similar to the views available in Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. Finally, there's a Tags-On view (see
