Creating a Visual XML Editor
Ivar Ekman · Tampere University Institutional Repository (Tampere University) · 2008
XML files are widely used but few generic visual editors exist. Most editors only display the content as text with color coding and indentation. In this thesis existing XML editors are evaluated and, as XML files are trees, several existing visualizations for hierarchies are presented in order to find appropriate ones for presenting XML files. Improvements are suggested for Icicle plot and Cheops but otherwise left for future research. A new tree visualization technique, Tabbed Treemaps, is developed and a new XML editor based on it is created and evaluated. With XML documents up to 100 kilobytes the new editor is found to give a compact overview of the document in a way not possible in other editors. In order to work well with larger files and develop the editor in general, several improvements are suggested but left for further research. Keywords and phrases: XML, visualizing, tree, Treemaps