xmlhack: Topologi Collaborative Markup Editor 1.0 released

Topologi builds a variety of novel features and emphases into this editor, including strong support for non-well-formed and non-valid documents, and SGML modes.

Topologi offers support for the ISO DSDL (Document Schema Description Languages) draft standard for document schema and processing systems. In particular, it supports Schematron and RELAX NG schema validation as well as WXS and DTD. It breaks down well-formedness and validation checking into progressive steps, each tailored to various stages of development of the document, in order to provide manageable guidance in editing.

Topologi supports XML Application Archive (XAR) and DZIP2, which is a ZIP format and XML processing instruction specification for packaging the schemata or stylesheets to be used together with an XML instance.

The editor provides a table editing widget for simple editing of data in table form regardless of the actual element names used to construct the table. It can import relational data using ODBC or JDBC into such tabular XML forms.

Rick Jelliffe, CTO of Topologi, is well-known in the XML community for his development of Schematron, participation on the WXS working group, advocacy of schema system diversity, and participation in the ISO DSDL working group. He says of the new editor:

Apart from the basic, proven and familiar design of a text editor, we have tried to zig where everyone else zags. Every editor embodies assumptions about the skills, training and support available to its users. It is interesting to figure out what they were, for various tools: the user is a programmer, or the user will freak out if they don't have a tool that simulates Word, for example. In our case we have tried to go for breadth: we want it to be a useful tool on anyone's desktop.

Topologi is commercial software with an "evaluator" version available and a low individual user price. It is initially available only for Windows. Linux and Mac OS X versions are planned for later this year.