A Pluggable XML Editor by Grant Vergottini.
From the post:
Ever since I announced my HTML5-based XML editor, I’ve been getting all sorts of requests for a variety of implementations. While the focus has been, and continues to be, providing an Akoma Ntoso based legislative editor, I’ve realized that the interest in a web-based XML editor extends well beyond Akoma Ntoso and even legislative editors.
So… with that in mind I’ve started making some serious architectural changes to the base editor. From the get-go, my intent had been for the editor to be “pluggable” although I hadn’t totally thought it through. By “pluggable” I mean capable of allowing different information models to be used. I’m actually taking the model a bit further to allow modules to be built that can provide optional functionality to the base editor. What this means is that if you have a different document information model, and it is capable of being round-tripped in some way with an editing view, then I can probably adapt it to the editor.
Let’s talk about the round-tripping problem for a moment. In the other XML editors I have worked with, the XML model has had to quite closely match the editing view that one works with. So you’re literally authoring the document using that information model. Think about HTML (or XHTML for an XML perspective). The arrangement of the tags pretty much exactly represents how you think of an deal with the components of the document. Paragraphs, headings, tables, images, etc, are all pretty much laid out how you would author them. This is the ideal situation as it makes building the editor quite straight-forward.
Note the line:
What this means is that if you have a different document information model, and it is capable of being round-tripped in some way with an editing view, then I can probably adapt it to the editor.
I think that means that we don’t all have to use the same editing view and at the same time, we can share an underlying format. Or perhaps even annotate texts with subject identities, not even realizing we are helping others.
This is an impressive bit of work and as the post promises, there is more to follow.
(I first saw this at Legal Informatics. http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/vergottini-on-improvements-to-akneditor-html-5-based-xml-editor-for-legislation/)