I’ve done some thinking (and code design) on how I perceive a XML editor could work. Basically, I’m following the lines of a blog post I made last year. I’m hoping that if I provide an architecture, others will provide language-specific features.
I found glazou’s latest article on this interesting, and I think he’s working on a different aspect of the problem. For all I know, he may already have a working solution to what I’m doing. That’s how much source code we’ve seen… (If you’re reading this, glazou, don’t take this as an attack on you… just a polite, light-hearted poke.)
I have a prototype architecture for such an editor, which I’m calling “Verbosio”. (Because XML is verbose.) The primary goal of this project is to make it easy for other developers to insert their own language editors into this application. That is, to offer simple conversions of their own standalone editors into Verbosio extensions that do the real work.
To that end, I have six XPIDL files I’ve defined which describe the crux of this architecture. The simplest one I’m calling xeITransaction. All that does is extend nsITransaction with one property. That property identifies a XUL box overlaid in the Verbosio editor, which is basically a small form. Users fill in the blanks, bonk on the OK button, and the code executes a command based on the input. I don’t define the form, you (the developer) do.
The other IDL files are really not much more complex than that… three out of the six IDL’s have no methods defined at all.
So, with that said, who among you would spend their time making a XML language editor written in XUL/JS/XBL/CSS/etc. “fit” into Verbosio? The less work you have to do, I figure, the better. In most parts, I would hope all you’d have to do would be to copy & paste code from the original project into new files. I’d provide well-documented templates with instructions. (Verbosio will come with very minimal editing capabilities stand-alone..

. but the implementations of those capabilites are the templates I hope others will build from.)
If you’d be interested, please comment with the intended XML language, the project that’s already out there, and your interest in directly contributing a port of the project. Verbosio as a project cannot succeed without external help and community interest. Please no “This would be a great idea!” comments unless you intend to actively contribute more than feedback.
UPDATE: I miscalculated on the xeITransaction interface above. I realized this evening that, as is, you as a developer would have to create either a new component class or new interface for every type of transaction. This is unacceptable, even to me writing the template extensions. So I’ll be adding a setTransactionType method to xeITransaction.idl, and implementations of xeITransaction would then become more like a command library.