Features
Document Actions
A Wysiwyg XML Editor
Etna is a wysiwyg xml editor. It means that you can edit xml document as you edit any document in OpenOffice.org, or MS Word for example. You'll never edit directly an xml tag or an xml attribute.
RelaxNG Validator
Etna uses an internal RelaxNG Validator to allow you to create or modify documents without errors : the xml content is always well-formed, and is always valid, beside the corresponding RelaxNg schema.
Of course, before editing a document, you should register the corresponding RelaxNG schema into Etna. This schema could be on you hard drive or on a web site.
Support of RelaxNG extensions
Inside your RelaxNG schema, you can add some specific patterns to provide label and description for each element, the URI of a CSS file, some default blank content etc. So Etna can display a friendly user interface. For example, it shows a "insert a new paragraph" menu item instead of "insert a new <p>".
Of course, all label and description can be localized.
Datatypes library
Etna provides two datatype library for the validator : RelaxNG datatypes and XMLSchema datatypes. You can add your own datatype library throw an extension.
Extensibility
Because Etna is based on the Mozilla framework and its rendering engine, Gecko, it provides the same extension system as you find in Firefox 1.0 (not 1.5 yet). So :
- it's easy to add new user interface elements (buttons, toolbars, menu item or else) : all the user interface is written in XUL and CSS
- it's easy to add new features, and new datatypes libraries
- it's easy to localize Etna and other extensions
So, you can create and/or install an extension to add a new schema and its specific user interface, to add a localization pack, to add tools, protocols etc.
