Roll Your Own XML Editor
By Michael Floyd
When Tim Berners-Lee developed the concepts behind the World Wide Web, he never envisioned that HTML authors would work directly with the markup language. Instead, he theorized that they would use tools to generate the markup automatically. That, of course, was before the introduction of complex tags, scripting languages, applets, dynamic HTML, and the like. The complexity of these technologies and the control that authors prefer to exercise over their documents has kept them knee deep in code.
With XML, it's possible to revisit Berners-Lee's vision. XML simplifies documents by separating presentation and programming logic from content, and that allows authors to focus solely on their data. The data can be marked up with a tool that lets authors retain control over their documents without requiring them to deal with the underlying code. To take the tool concept one step further, I created a Web-based editor that generates and saves fully validated XML documents based on text supplied by authors. While the editor doesn't completely eliminate the need for markup, it greatly simplifies the process. That means content authors can spend more time creating and less time coding.
Because I serve most of my XML documents with Rocket—my own freely available, back-end framework that I first introduced in this magazine in my "Beyond HTML" in the February 2000 issue—I designed the editor to operate seamlessly with it. The editor creates an XML document that's stored on my Rocket-enabled site and automatically transformed to HTML (with complete formatting, navigation, and so on) before being served to users.
