Base Idea

Word processor, XML editor

The forefathers of SGML, HTML, and XML spent effort to write down formatting rules inside text in a well-defined notation. The user interface of MTE overtakes this idea more or less literally.

MTE is a document-based XML editor. The structure of tag menu and attribute context-menu is written down as an XML document which can be customized to best fit to user's DTD. When delivered, the menus for MTE are configured for XHTML.

Document-based means, it is optimised

to work correctly with XML elements,
on the other hand process text like a word processor.

This is how these working modes are supported:

Tags dealing with text formatting are available by an own main menu entry, for XHTML e. g. <strong> and <b> (delivery state).

For construction of tables, there's a menu entry.

XML Editor	Word Processor
Tags are hilighted by colors, e. g. <br />. Tags can be hidden totally or partially as well as formatting codes of a word processor, e. g. < />.	The text is visually formatted as meant by enclosing tags, e. g. <b>bold</b>. tables can be switched from source code to visual table view. Graphics can be displayed by menu.
Nested element levels are visualised by indentation. The amount of indentation is changeable.	Inside text, there are no hard line breaks. Word wrapping occurs at window border. The indentation remains unchanged.
Tags are made by menu.	Everyday-functions are available by a symbol bar. The symbol bar is switchable.
In XML mode, user's text selection is corrected such that it is impossible to select a non-complete element. Depending on dragging direction, the selection will be extended or reduced.	In text mode, the user can select any text parts, even element-gapping. Then, the selection is segmented such that each segment contains a complete element. Selection will be removed from non-paired selected tags.
It is possible to split or join tag areas by keyboard shortcuts. It is possible to remove surrounding tags from a text area.	The enter key splits a paragraph, e. h. in XHTML <p>...</p>. On the beginning of a paragraph, the backspace key joins to paragraph elements.
Entities are made with menu.	Numerical character entities inside the text are displayed in human-readable form, e. g. Ä for Ä
Normally, the window displays the complete XML document.	For HTML documents, MTE is configurable such that only the body element is to be processed.
Tags and attributes aren't encapsulated inside dialog elements which must be learned as well as the tags themselves, but are displayed as normal text. The user can overwrite the text of the tags. He just must respect the XML syntax.	The program supports generating of tags by menu and generating of attributs by context- If the user writes down the attributes in HTML-3.2-Syntax, the program corrects to XML bzw. XHTML on the fly. If the user writes down non-valid markup, the program ignores the changes.

Base Idea