XML Editors

Comparison of XML editors circa 2001

13.04.2001

Overview
One of the identified requirements for the Tequiza project is anXML/webforms editor. I have evaluated the top offerings for the Windowsoperating system, which is our target audience. As a basis forcomparison and with the idea in mind that down the road there may be aneed to offer a non-windows version I also looked at the several unixofferings.

Functional requirements

A robust environment for editing existing XML and HTML documents,target platform is Windows 95/98. Must be user friendly, the targetaudience is likely a content manager or pr person rather than a seriouscoder.
Breakdown of editors

Several open source editors targeted at the linux platform wereincluded for comparison. Note that any editors that say Unix shouldwork on all major flavors (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, *BSD, GNU/Linux, MacOS-X).

Athens (Win)-This editor is essentially Notepad withsome bells andwhistles and a toolbar. The UI is low quality, and does not present thesort of professional look and feel that is needed for an OEM'dapplication. While this might be useful for someone who is veryfamiliar with XML it is of little use to the target audience.

Aweb Developer (Win)- This application aims to be afull featured webdevelopment environment and falls short of the mark by several yards.The interface is not completely horrible but is also not acceptable forour purposes. The sole instance of XML support is a set of Miva tags.Error messages seem to be a poorly understood concept here, and itwould be fairly intimidating for a non-technical user.

Breeze Factor (Win/Unix) - A very powerful and fullfeatured XML IDE,though the UI isn't quite friendly enough for non-technical users.Database interaction is solid and easy to use. $495/seat, volumepricing is available.

Dreamweaver (Win/Mac)- The interface forDreamweaver will seem a littleunfamiliar to many Windows users at first (toolbars and workspacesfloating above the desktop in a very Mac/X-like manner rather thanwithin their own contained frame) but other than that it is a veryrobust and friendly application. Once the end users are comfortablewith the UI, they would have little trouble accomplishing their tasksquickly and easily. The learning curve for this app is about averagefor a commercial Windows application (e.g. once the concepts of theapplication are understood, daily use is fairly simple). The lonedownside to Dreamweaver is it's tendency to protect the user from toomuch information about what they are doing. It is bundled withAllaire's Homesite, which the more technical people will be inclined touse instead.

EditML (Win)- Slightly more full-featured thanAthens, this featuresperhaps the most graceless error handling I've seen outside of outrightcrashing the application. Novices to XML will be frightened, moreadvanced users will be frustrated by the lack of any useful features.

FrameMaker (Win/Unix/Mac) - Overkill. Framemaker isa fantastic, fullfeatured, reasonably user friendly application that is so far much morethan what is needed that it would be cost-prohibitive and downrightfoolish to OEM it.

GEXml (Win/Unix) - A Java based open source xmleditor. This stays trueto the traditional unix approach of do one thing and do it well. Theuser interface is simply a text editor with a resources pane and a fewtabs for attributes and the like. Fine for more technical users who arevery familiar with XML. The one downside is that which is inherent withmost non-commercial Java application, and that is performance. Windowshas probably the best JVM outside of the Solaris and HP-UX ones, andthe performance is still less than what you might expect. In theorythis would work on the Mac as well, but anything Java based on the Macis a tremendously bad idea, as Mac easily has the worst JVM out there(unless, possibly, there is an Atari Jaguar JVM I'm unaware of).

Homesite (Win) - A very very full featured texteditor. This is one ofthe best web editors out there for coders, but it isn't user friendlyenough for the average non-coder user. You can create your own xmltoolbar which makes point-and-click work with xml very easy. This nowcomes bundled with Dreamweaver 4, and together they are a great combo,with DW being the one that the non-coders would use.

IceSculptor (Unix)- Bills itself as a completedesktop publishing app.The UI is similar to an old version of MS Publish or perhaps PageMaker.Performance is simply unacceptable even on a powerful box. While itcould, in theory, be used for editing XML docs and webforms, it is notadvisable. This however the first release of this product, so when itcomes time to evaluate a non-windows partner this might be worthlooking at again, as their more mature products are quite nice.

LeanEdit (Unix) - As with most of the non-Windowsofferings, this istargeted towards more technical people. This is a solid entry, performswell, but the UI simply isn't intuitive and it doesn't offer enoughfunctionality to meet the needs of this project.

Morphon (Unix)- This is probably the most solid ofthe non-Windowsapps. Comparable to Homesite or ScriptWorx, this also suffers from aslightly intimidating attribute editor interface but other than that itis a serious contender in terms of functionality and stability.

Popkin (Win) - Envision is a new entry into thefield, with a pleasantUI and reasonable functionality, though there is no database piece asof this time.

ScriptWorx (Win) - This editor achieves what Awebattempts, and does it rather nicely. Certainly on par with Homesite,but still not quite user friendly enough for the target audience.

XmetaL (Win)- The first and still the best (thoughDreamweaver is avery, very close second). SoftQuad has a long history of SGMLapplications that are user friendly and extremely powerful. Thedownside is one inherent in all of their products that I've used: theyare resource hogs. They will run on a PII-400 with 64M of RAM, but Iwouldn't recommend it. Windows users will be able to quickly and easilyunderstand the interface, and it is easy to access granular views ofthe documents.

XML Junction (Win)- I'm not entirely sure what thisproduct is meant tobe, it seems to be sort of a hybrid visio-clone/xml editor. Avoid. Itisn't particularly good at either and the user interface was apparentlydesigned with the intent of causing mental anguish. The only way itmakes sense if they plan on charging for support calls, which will benumerous.

Conclusion

The offerings are wildly varied in terms of functionality and quality.The shareware and open source offerings are not as mature nor as fullfeatured as the commercial ones, and the UI suffers as a result. Giventhe target audience the best choices for the Windows platform would beXmetaL 2.1 from Softquad or Dreamweaver 4 from Macromedia.