Hey now - lets not be making fun of gVIM! :)

In all honesty though, IDE's are the way to go with developing things, and Verbosio sounds immensely promising. Are you close to an alpha release that could possibly spark interest in the project and then maybe get more devs?

(From Alex: Funny, every time I think I'm only a couple weeks from an initial release, something else crops up...)

Alex, just make something public and call it pre-alpha or whatever. Get a bug tracker going and a small web forum or newsgroup.

Sparking some more public interest in what you're doing would be a healthy thing for both yourself and the project. It might even encourage people to give you a hand.

To mix metaphors, the groundswell of interest in XML never turned into a sweet spot for XML editors. HTML ran out of steam some time ago. But people doing elaborate systems generate richer XHTML using content management software. Meanwhile plain HTML editing is going away, replaced by the awful phpBB tags or limited Wiki syntax.

I've never found an XML editor to love. Altova XMLSpy does a lot but when doing simple XML editing I always wound up scrolled 15 inches sideways typing in a small box. Their Stylevision/Authentic approach is probably a good solution but I never took the time to learn it, just like I never grokked Dreamweaver's XML-aware mode. "Open source XML editors examined" on NewsForge is an interesting summary. Maybe Quanta Plus has some good ideas.

I want an XML editor that lets me say "Do these parts of the schema as form fields, do these other parts in a WYSIWYG text editor, and do these other parts as a nesting tag editor" without me doing any work.

Cheers and good luck,

Count Zero > Burning Chrome

I don't know if you can say that IE isn't the main thing holding back the web, since IE doesn't support XML properly. If it did, perhaps this argument would be more fair :)

While i agree with you on the lack of decent XML markup tools, i disagree on the effect this has on the web.

To me the web is more about content, not the way we deliver, create or mix the content. RSS, mash-ups, SOAP services, etc all this is nice from a technology perspective - but as soon as the inital "wow" effect is over, i go back to the tools/websites/services offering real content and real value - even if in an ugly, user-unfriendly way (ebay, msdn, craigslist, etc)

There are way too many blogs and myspace pages out there offering nothing of substance, giving those people better tools wouldn't make the content better.

Maybe better tools would help us developers to built better and more flexible infrastructures and software for content authors - but i think we shouldn't over estimate our and the technologies role.

Is Verbosio a text editor? If so, I hate to say it but Visual Studio 2005 has pretty good support for editing a limited number of XML formats by hand. I'd prefer to use an open source tool though. I hear VIM 7 has nice code completetion, but I've never used it to edit XML.

If its not a text editor, than I can understand why 4 years later you don't have an alpha version! 1 program that provided GUI editors for all of those file types would be immense!

(From Alex: Verbosio won't be a text editor. It will support text editing of XML as a last resort.)

Yulup http://www.yulup.org might be of interest to you. At least Yulup gives me some hope and creature comforts :-)

skierpage : perhaps the tool you want is Etna : http://rhaptos.org/downloads/editing/etna/

This is a wysiwyg XML editor. But it is not finished yet...

(From Alex: Yes, and I linked to it in my article. :-) )