Introduction

This report provides a brief review of two XML editors. Both Adobe's FrameMaker ® 7.0 and SoftQuad's XMetaL ® 3 are commercially available and in use. This report compares these two packages when used to develop a structured document, in this case, a business letter.

For each of the products the following aspects are reviewed:

• Editor Overview

• Document View

• Structure View

• Elements and Attributes

• Document Validation

While there are numerous other areas for comparison such as modification tracking, spell checking, configuring toolbars, etc., the scope of this report is limited to the listed topics.

The following annotated figure shows the appearance of the final business letter used for the editor examples. The XML Elements are shown in RED as a reference to the structure.

Final Business Letter with Element Annotations

This report should be interpreted as a comparison only. While a few comments might indicate advantages of a particular editor feature, the reader should not infer any specific recommendation for one product over the other.

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