The second major piece of Verbosio 0.1, its XML Inspector extension module, is now in a semi-stable, “alpha” state.

The first major piece, the core architecture, isn’t there yet. I have much more work to do, including implementing the other ten major pieces, before I can declare victory on that.

Recently, someone commented that they thought Verbosio was “just a fancy DOM inspector-type thing”. Given what I’ve been talking about for months now, this is a very understandable assumption. Indeed, the XML Inspector module takes its inspiration directly from DOM Inspector (thank yous go out to hewitt, timeless, caillon, sdwilsh, and all the other contributors to DOM-I…), but actually is a completely new code base. Most of the features you find in DOM-I you won’t find in this module. Many of the features are too much for Verbosio’s needs, and a couple things Verbosio needed that are unlikely to return to DOM-I.

What will you find? Well, I’ve preserved the DOM Nodes view (that’s your tree representation of the DOM). On the right hand panel, you’ll be able to edit attributes, comments, processing instructions, text and character data nodes. You’ll also be able to add attributes to elements. So far, nothing new.

Oh, and you’ll also be able to create new elements from scratch. That’s something DOM-I doesn’t let you do right now.

Screenshots? You want screenshots? Okay. I’ll give you screenshots. Bear in mind the whole UI is in a very early state; better editing capabilities than ordinary textboxes are on the schedule.

The biggest thing to note, though, is that I’ve developed 90% of the code the XML Inspector module uses for another major piece of Verbosio entirely

. It’s for the Verbosio markup template system I blogged about three months ago.