The XML FAQ

Editors

Choosing an editor is one of the hardest tasks, because everyone has different requirements and levels of knowledge, and what appears to be incredibly simple to one user may seem dauntingly difficult to another. All XML editors guide the user in the construction or maintenance of XML documents—that's their purpose in life.

The simplest ones just keep track of matching pointy brackets, start-tags and end-tags, and balanced quotes, leading to a well-formed file. More powerful editors can read a DTD or Schema and provide menu choices for element manipulation and attribute editing, and prevent the creation of invalid documents. The most powerful ones can also be used for DTD or Schema development, and for XML processing.

Some are text-mode editors—they show all the markup and the text with nothing hidden, often using colour to distinguish markup characters. Some have a synchronous typographic mode as well, using a stylesheet to format the information, so you appear to be editing a typeset view of the document (incorrectly called WYSIWYG). Text-mode editors worry some users because the pointy brackets are visible (they think it's programming); synchronous typographic editors worry other people because the pointy brackets are not visible, which makes it hard to see where stuff begins and ends.

The more sophisticated editors are programmable, so the nature and effect of the markup and the user's actions can be limited or enhanced by scripts in JavaScript, VBscript, Python, Tcl, Lisp, etc, even XSLT.

Do not be tempted to use a non-XML editor like Notepad, vi, or textedit for XML documents: it will only end in tears, shame, and recriminations. Get properly-equipped. (Microsoft's separate XML Notepad product is usable for editing small instances, but not for DTD or Schema development.)

There is a recent (2004) comparative paper on choosing an XML editor from Thijs van den Broek which may help, and an article and set of links by Saqib Ali.