Most of us who venture into web page creation will come across the task of choosing an XML editor sooner or later. XML is a mark-up language which is used in the middle layer. Since it is platform independent, it is the preferred choice of programmers who like to maintain flexibility.

The main purpose of XML is to focus on documents and define the data that they contain; it has taken on the role of representation of “data structures”. This is an efficient way of storing and organizing data. Using an XML editor with built in error checking features becomes useful when you are describing a large document and its data.

Check for the following features when choosing an XML editor and you will avoid a lot of headaches. By default all XML editors should have Schema and DTD (Document Type Declaration) based validation. The editor should be capable of attaching some sort of standardized display component like XSL () or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for display into standard HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) pages thus giving it WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) capability.

The editor should support Grid Views as well as Tree Views, the former being a table-like representation of the data structure and the latter a graphic tree structure. These two features are extremely useful when creating or editing a complex schema or DTD.

The editor should also have the capability to create a standardized format of XML from the one you have written into it without any degradation of syntax or quality. Most modern XML editors now support a multitude of features that include template support to ensure a standardized approach throughout the document library as well as support for various other languages like Java etc. Some editors are free while some can range to several hundred dollars.