[Simon]

I would like to read XML documents under OS X.

Now, of course I can view them with a text editor or woth more, cat, etc., but it's not very comfortable.

Are there any small, simple and possibly free XML viewers? Maybe something like Apple's Porperty List Viewer?

I've seen Morphon on macupdate.com, but it was bloated, ugly and totally overkill.

Any better suggestions?

[ism]

Originally posted by Simon:
I would like to read XML documents under OS X.

For just viewing XML docs try Mozilla. It supports:

XML 1.0 (w3c recommendation)
Namespaces in XML, (w3c recommendation)
Associating Style Sheets with XML Documents (w3c recommendation)
XML Base (currently for links only; not used for :visited, etc. CSS properties) (w3c recommendation)
XSLT (w3c recommendation)

This might not be 'small' enough for you though.

[Simon]

Originally posted by ism:
For just viewing XML docs try Mozilla. It supports:
...
This might not be 'small' enough for you though.

Well, Mozilla isn't very small, but I tried Camino since it uses the same engine as Mozilla. But unfortunetaly that obviously isn't enough, because Camino just displayed the file as text.

I was really hoping that there would be something more compact than Mozilla.

What's the deal with XML? There's a lot of buzz about it being the interchange format of the future and that it will be the bomb in the database world, yadayada, but actually it's just a simple key&value syntax. But then wth are there no simple viewers? All that would be needed is a simple parser. Am I missing something here...?

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

Originally posted by Simon:
Well, Mozilla isn't very small, but I tried Camino since it uses the same engine as Mozilla.

There's a bug open for this.

[natan]

Originally posted by Simon:
Are there any small, simple and possibly free XML viewers? Maybe something like Apple's Porperty List Viewer?

I find Apple's Property List Editor to be quite sufficient for my needs (and it's small, simple, and free).

[Simon]

Originally posted by natan:
I find Apple's Property List Editor to be quite sufficient for my needs (and it's small, simple, and free).

Well for plists it's fine.

Problem is that it can't view the XML files I'm getting here at work. Don't know what kind they are, but I suppose they come from some MS program, since it says something about MS in the header.

[Group51]

The organisation I work for, lets call it a very important inspectorate in England, is likely to use XML for its inspection forms. XML seems to be the perfect nonproprietary system for collecting evidence and data.

The best tool for creating and entering text and data seems to be Microsoft InfoPath (PC Only) because instead of:

<name> John Smith </name>

You get

Name: John Smith.

Everything I have seen on the Mac so far does the former. Is there anything that does the latter, i.e present the XML as a form you can actually use without being a hackoor? End users won't want to edit the XML code, they just want to edit the document content.

Actually, I lie, Safari displays just the content, unformatted, but you can't edit in Safari, obviously.

I wish I was a programmer. It seems like a fairly easy thing to implement.

[Love Calm Quiet]

I, too, would like to be able to dabble in XML realm -- and am intrigued about the use of Property List Editor. A search of my HD disclosed that it was indeed in the Developer Tools. But there's NO help available, and the window that PLE opens uses terms that I have NO idea what they're talking about.

Anybody got any hints for me on how to learn the potentials (and terminology) for using it (with XML files generally)?

[Millennium]

A lot of people misunderstand what XML is.

XML isn't a data format. If anything, I'd call it a metaformat, that is, a format for data formats. The idea is that if you stick to a couple of basic concepts, you can do away with the most basic step of parsing, because you can get interchangeable parsers to do that work for you.

That's it. That's all XML really is, nothing more, nothing less. And yet, despite this seemingly simple role, so many things have risen out of it.

Ahem. Anyway, this is what makes "XML viewer" a misnomer. The best you can do on a universal level is show the data hierarchy; other than that, unless you have some special knowledge of the file format, you really have no way of knowing what to expect. SVG viewers, for example, expect to process SVG, and so they have special knowledge of what all those tags and such mean. Without that knowledge, they wouldn't be able to do much of anything with the files. The same is true of Web browsers viewing XHTML, or XSLT processors doing their stuff.

Given this, I've never been able to really see the point of "XML-viewing" apps. About the only thing they can really protect you from is errors in well-formedness, and by the time you're done entering your data into all the little form fields you could have typed significantly more using a straight text editor. The only real problem comes when the XML has been poorly formatted; here an XML-viewer could come in handy, but there are also plenty of reformatters to take care of the problem.

That's just it: generic XML-viewing apps don't really make things all that much easier. They seem like they should -after all, it's supposed to be a GUI to view XML, rather than just straight text- but simply because of the nature of XML, this doesn't really happen. XML is too general a thing to benefit much.

[cowerd]

<name> John Smith </name>

You get

Name: John Smith.

That latter is NOT XML, but XML run through an XSLT transform. To dabble is XML or to use XML you need to be able to transform it from data to information.

As most people here are running OSX you can play with PHP and the built in XML/XSLT parser or you can get the app TextXSLT from Marc Liyanage and play with XML/XSLT > HTML or XML/XSLT > text or XML/XSLT > .PDF transforms. Its also a simple XML editor as it checks for well formedness and can complete tags.

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/

XML/XSLT and PHP are great if you don't want to mess with an SQL backend and you have some simple and repetitive data to display.