Browsing and Editing XML Schema Documents with an Interactive Editor

Abstract

With the advent of the web there has been a great demand for data interchange between existing applications using internet infrastructure and also between newer web services applications. The W3C XML standard is becoming the internet data interchange format, even though the initial XML standard was not well suited to this. The XML Schema recommendation which added more rigorous data structuring and data typing provides much better support for defining such data centric XML documents. While data centric XML documents are typically produced by applications there are still a wide range of situations where manual document creation is required. This paper presents an XML editor design which supports the creation of XML Schema based documents. We show how an interface that uses a tight coupling between grammar and content views facilitates the rapid creation of data centric documents. We show how our interface supports browsing and editing of documents where XML schema specific extensions such as subtyping are present. Our design is realised in the Xeena for Schema tool which we demonstrate.