It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

XML gives you a fairly-low-level standard for moving semi-structured-text data across applications and organizations. Also provides a method for encoding semantics into slightly structured content. An attempt to apply the lessons of the Web (Worse Is Better) to SGML.

Since there are (unfortunately multiple) validation-specification schemes, and pre-existing parsers and validators, it should be a bit easier to transform the XML generated from one app into the XML consumable by another.

But don't count on it. If there's a significant semantic mis-match (difference in data model), you could go nuts. Not unlike the problem in creating a Data Warehouse from unintegated applications within the enterprise.

And the more complex the application, the more likely that there will be big semantic differences. This means that you can still end up effectively locked into a single application, even though it supports/exports XML. Because even having that data, you may not be able to transform it into a structure usable by any other application in a similar way. (This is a big issue, I think, with Knowledge Management systems.)

GUI Text Editor-s

• long list

• [EtNa] http://rhaptos.org/downloads/editing/etna/ built on Gecko/MozIlla

• Xerlin http://www.xerlin.org/ JVM-based. Open Source/free.

• Jaxe http://jaxe.sourceforge.net/

• [Liquid Studio] required DotNet blech

• [XPontus] http://xpontus.sourceforge.net/ not fully baked?

• [X Standard] http://xstandard.com/en/downloads/?product=lite

• [XTreeM] tree-oriented Ms Windows-only?

• [Open Exeed] http://openexeed.sourceforge.jp/

• [XmlMind] http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/ free version is only for non-biz use

• Vex http://vex.sourceforge.net/ considered good, but EClipse-based, which is a bit much for casual users

• [XmlPro] - free for individuals, "small fee" for businesses http://www.vervet.com/ - doesn't claim MacOsX support!

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