XML Hacks

Edit XML Documents with Emacs and nXML

nXML mode for GNU Emacs provides a powerful environment for creating valid XML documents.

If you’ve been editing XML from within GNU Emacs using PSGML, here’s a tip: get rid of it. That’s right, tear it out, dump it, make it disappear—because there’s a much better tool available: nXML. (Grab the latest nxml-mode-200nnnnn.tar.gz file from http://www.thaiopensource.com/download/.) nXML was developed by James Clark, the man who brought us groff, expat, sgmls, SP, and Jade, as well as being a driving force behind the development of XPath, XSLT (and before that, DSSSL), and, along with Murata Makoto, RELAX NG (http://www.relaxng.org/).

Which brings us back to what nXML is all about: nXML is a very clever mechanism for doing RELAX NG-driven, context-sensitive, validated editing. What’s particularly clever about it is that, unlike PSGML and unlike virtually every other XML editing application available—with the exception of the Topologi Collaborative Markup Editor (http://www.topologi.com/products/tme/)—it provides real-time, automatic visual identification of validity errors.

This hack assumes that you are familiar with Emacs. The README file that comes with nXML states that you must use Emacs version 21.x (preferably 21.3 or later) in order to use nXML. To get nXML to run in Emacs, you must first load the rng-auto.el file. In Emacs, type:

M-x load-file

Then load the file rng-auto.el from the location where you downloaded and extracted the latest ...