Eclipse Visual Editor for XML

The Eclipse Visual Editor for XML is a set of plug-ins that provide WYSIWYM editing ability for XML files. This can be used regardless of the XML involved, and uses CSS stylesheets to provide the formatting for the presentation layer. All that is needed is a stylesheet and an appropriate XML file to edit. It hides the XML tags from the user, allow them to have a word processor like experience but store the information in the native XML format.

The Vex plug-ins will also provide an API to edit structured textual formats that are similar to XML (e.g. WikiText). Vex's editor widget can provide the same editing convenience for those lightweight formats. All that is needed is a mapping between the text format and the object model used by Vex, in conjunction with CSS stylesheets to define the presentation.

There is a long lasting demand in the community for a text entry widget that also allows simple formatting and semantic tagging of the entered text. Most previous solutions were based on the browser widget, Swing or other external (not native SWT) technologies. Vex will accommodate this demand with a solution natively implemented in SWT.