Thursday, July 20, 2006

XML Editing on a Mac

My job requires that I analyse and edit XML documents frequently. I thought I'd share a couple of things I've learnt about XML editing on the Mac.

1- Software: First thing is XML editing software. With my old VAIO, I would use XMLSpy Free Edition - a Windows only program that allows you to validate and 'pretty-print' XML among a whole host of other features for free. Unfortunately, I have not found an equivalent program for free on the Mac. However, I did find a good XML editor called 'oXygen' (http://www.oxygenxml.com/) which has a Mac port. Again, it allows validation and 'pretty-printing' but expires after about 14 days.

2- Browsers: To test the XML is create, I submit XML text to a website which then returns a response in an ASPX wrapper. I found that Apple Safari tends to reformat the ASPX response returned by then system so that I can't see the tags relating to the data in the response. As a result, I have found Apple Safari was not particularly good for my line of work and switched to using Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com/) for my XML tasks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I saw your blog post when searching for a Mac OS X XML editor. Just wanted you to know that I found EditX which has a free "lite" version that does most of what I need plus a steep pay version ($70) with more features.

Link: http://free.editix.com/