If you’ve ever wanted to do WYSIWYG editing of XML in a browser, I think you’re going to like the elegant solution I stumbled across. The idea actually culminated from reading Kurt Cagle’s excitement around XQuery in the Browser, and my desire to create a MLUC DemoJam entry that could excite publishers about my latest passion, HTML5. At first I thought XQuery in the Browser opened a new possibility to do simple browser-based WYSIWYG editing, but as I dug into it I found it was much simpler to do the XSLT in MarkLogic, with granular pointers attached to each editable XML node. This solution allows me to very simply and efficiently:
- Render XML to final HTML using existing XSLT
- only minor modifications are required to add “sourcePath” attributes to the HTML
- MarkLogic’s xdmp:path function makes it simple to get precise paths to the source XML content
- Allow WYSIWYG editing of the XML directly from the browser
- HTML5′s contentEditable attribute makes this simple
- Use very efficient AJAX calls for immediate update to the source XML document
- MarkLogic’s xdmp:node-replace allows pin-point updates of only the changed node
All this in less than 100 lines of code! The video below does better justice to what I’m talking about:
Please note that I’m not trying to demo a full-featured editor here. This is just a proof of concept. Obviously many features need to be added before this is usable. Nevertheless, this simple demo shows an approach that could enable many highly usable solutions for publishers.
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