ETD Guide/Technical Issues/Support for students to write directly in XML

This topic is discussed briefly in Overview: writing with word processors and structured editors and in more detail in Writing directly in SGML/XML.

The following extends that discussion by focusing on tools to help students to write directly in XML.

XML Tools

To author and view documents written in XML, different kinds of tools are required. They are:
 * Editor
 * Parser/Validator
 * Browser

Editor

There are quite a large number of XML editors, for different platforms are available. Most of them costs less than $100. A lot of them have free evaluation version that can be downloaded. the following list gives link to some such editors.
 * XML Spy http://www.xmlspy.com
 * XMLWriter http://www.megginson.com/Software/
 * XED http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ht/xed.html
 * Xeena http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xeena
 * Morphon XML Editor http://www.morphon.com/
 * Emile for MAC http://www.in-progress.com/emile/
 * Free/OpenSource version of the Serna XML editor https://github.com/ydirson/serna-free

Parser/Validator

When a XML document is created, it is parsed/validated to see if it is syntactically correct and well formed. To accomplish this task, we need a XML parser/validator. There are a lot of XML parser available. Most of the XML editors mentioned above is also a XML parser. For example, XML Spy provides a IDE for XML, i.e. it is both editor and parser.

To view a XML documents, we need a browser that supports XML. Many browsers now support XML, such as:
 * Internet explorer 5 and newer http://www.microsoft.com
 * Mozilla Firefox 0.9 and newer http://www.mozilla.org/
 * Netscape 5 and newer http://browser.netscape.com/
 * DocZilla http://www.doczilla.com/
 * HyBrick is an SGML/XML browser from Fujitsu.

Most newer browsers support XML in a way that lets it fully integrated with HTML. A stylesheet is required to view the XML documents. For ETD a cascading stylesheet has been developed for that. That stylesheet can be downloaded from http://www.etdguide.org/.

Next Section: Conversions from Word, Word Perfect or other RTF-compatible tools to SGML/XML