Balisage Paper: What will it take to get (end user) XML editors that people will use?
Norman Walsh
MarkLogic
Norman Walsh is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation where he works with the Application Services team. Norm is also an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide: he is chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the W3C where he is also co-chair of the XML Core Working Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee.
With more than a decade of industry experience, Norm is well known for his work on DocBook and a wide range of open source projects. He is the author of DocBook: The Definitive Guide.
Copyright © 2011 MarkLogic Corporation
Abstract
Many of us in the markup community have given up on the dream of ubiquitous XML. We still think the world would be better off with more XML and less proprietary data, but we know it isn’t going to happen without a game-changing invention. The world as a whole is simply not going to embrace XML in the way we had hoped without a painless way to create XML documents. We need XML editors that can be learned easily, that create the XML that savvy (and not-so-savvy) users want, that people can afford, and that can tolerate being used very badly. So, what will it take to get XML editors that don’t suck?