The World's Greatest XML Editor for Mac OS X
Alpha Test 1
Jim Rankin
June 28, 2004
Alpha Test
Fantastic wants to be the world's greatest XML editor for Mac OS X.
Fantastic is not a complete application, either in terms of bug fixes or features. The purpose of this Alpha Test
is to determine whether Fantastic's design and planned features match what is expected of the world's greatest
XML editor for OS X. If you want to be part of creating OS X's greatest XML editing experience, mail jimbokun@mac.com to inquire about
becoming a Fantastic tester.
Requirements
Fantastic runs on Mac OS 10.3 or higher.
Design Goals
These are the features that make editing XML with Fantastic a distinctive, authentic Mac OS X experience.
Fantastic is built almost entirely on Mac OS X native technologies.
Schema based editing
Required items
Recursively insert all required child elements and attributes of the selected element with just one click.
Doing this in a newly created element should create the minimum structure necessary for a valid element.
3 ways to insert attributes and elements
You can see a list of possible children for the selected element by clicking the Insert menu, clicking the insertion
combo box in the toolbar, or by control clicking on any element.
Inserting a child respects order constraints.
When Fantastic inserts a child element, it tries to do so in a way that doesn't violate any order constraints.
Can insert text nodes, too.
Fantastic will list schema enumeration values for the selected element and insert them as text nodes.
Text completion
Autocompletion in text view uses the same schema logic to list possible completions.
Fantastic also automatically inserts a close tag after you finish typing an open tag.
Inspectors
Inspectors are windows whose contents change as the selection in the document changes, providing more information about whatever is selected.
Get Info in the Finder serves a similar function, but the Finder opens a different window each time you Get Info on a different selection.
Works great with Expose
Using an interface with multiple windows works greate with Expose. Arrange windows however you want, and Expose still lets you
quickly find things hidden from view.
Text view as an inspector
View the text for the element selected in the outline view in an inspector window. This makes it easy to view only the part of the document
you want to focus on, whether it's the entire document at once or a single element with attributes. The text and outline views stay synchronized as you edit.
This is an unique approach to coordinating outline and text views of an XML document. Become a Fantastic tester and check it out.
WARNING: Editing text in the text inspector may be the least stable part of the application. If you do much editing
in this inspector, you WILL corrupt your documents and you WILL lose data. DO NOT use Fantastic on important data without backups.
Info inspector
Edit attributes in a table view (combo box for quickly adding new attributes). Edit an element's tag name.
Edit multi-line text node elements in a scrollable text view. All supporting schema based completion.
XPath
Fantastic uses Excelsior! Path, an open source, Cocoa compatible XPath framework built with the Excelsior framework.
The XPath interface looks and feels like a Mac search interface, using an Acqua search panel and a drawer coming out of the document window (similar to Preview.app).
You click on a search result in the drawer to select that item in the outline view.
To do
These are things that are necessary for a completed application but haven't been implemented yet. While necessary, these
features were given a lower priority for initial testing because they are not part of what makes Fantastic unique and distinctive.
Performance
When the Design Goal features are implemented and stable, this will be a top priority. Editing large (multi-megabyte) documents
in Fantastic needs to be improved. Optimizations to change this will happen when the key design features are stable.
Standard application features
Copy and paste and drag and drop (for outline view)
Undo
Preferences
These are standard features of good Mac OS X apps and will be part of Fantastic before beta testing begins.
Namespaces
More work needs to be done to make Fantastic do a great handling namespaces.
Other XML technologies
Validation
Support for DTDs and Relax-NG schemas.
XSLT (HTML, PDF preview, etc.)
These features common in XML editors will likely be implemented using open source code libraries with liberal licensing policies.
There are several quality, open source, portable libraries that implement these features.
How do I...?
A quick reference for how to get things done in Fantastic.
...assign a schema to a document?
Open the document using File > Open..., File > Open Recent, or use File > New to create a new document. Then select File > Assign Schema...
and navigate to the schema file. The file url for the schema will appear in the noNamespaceSchemaLocation attribute on the root element of
the document (if you haven't created the root element yet, this attribute will appear when you do create it).
Once you have assigned a schema, you can use all of the editing features that require a schema (see next question).
...edit a document in outline view?
You can do the following whether your document has a schema assigned or not.
Insert a new child element by typing the element name into the "Element to Insert" combo box in the toolbar, then hitting Return.
Delete an element by selecting the element then selecting Edit > Delete from the menu bar.
Edit a text node by double clicking in the Text column then typing or modifying what you find there. (Text nodes appear in the Text
column either directly to the right of an element's tag name, or below it if the element has attributes or other child elements.)
Attribute values can be edited the same way. Note that attribute names are prefixed by "@".
If your document has a schema assigned to it, you can also do the following.
Recursively insert all the child attributes and elements required by the schema by selecting Insert > Required Items from the menu bar.
Insert a child element or attribute by selecting Insert then the attribute or element's name. (Attribute names are prefixed by "@".) You can also perform these actions from an element's context menu. (Control clicking an element displays the Insert menu for that element.)
If you type the first few characters of the item you want to insert in the "Element to Insert" combo box in the toolbar, the complete
name of the element should appear for you. You can then insert an element with that name by hitting the return key.
...insert all of an elements child items required by the schema?
Select Required Items from the Insert menu or the element's context menu (see answer to 2. above).
...use text autocompletion in the text inspector?
At a point where you can legally insert a new element (whitespace, in a text node, between element start/end tags), insert "<". Then hit F8
or select Text > Complete for a list of possible elements that can be inserted at that place. If you have partially completed the tag name,
only tag names beginning with those characters should be displayed. Similarly, for a list of attribute completions, insert a
space after the tag name in an element's start tag then hit F8 or select Text > Complete for a list of allowable attributes.
...make the text and info inspectors visible?
To make the Selection Text inspector visible, select Text > Show Selection Text. To make the element inspector visible, select Window > Inspector.
...search with XPath?
Click the XPath ("//") button in the toolbar to show the XPath drawer for the document window. Type the path into the drawer's search field and
hit return. Select from the list of results underneath the search field to select that element in the outline view.
...open an XML file over the Internet?
Select File > Open URL..., type the XML file's URL, then click Open. To save changes, you will need to save the document to a local file.
...neatly format the text of an element?
To neatly indent the text of an element, select Text > Pretty Print. Please note that this indents ONLY the selected element NOT the entire document.
