How does Xopus work?

To fully understand what Xopus can do for you, it is important to understand how the editor works.

Xopus explained

To fully understand what Xopus can do for you, it is important to understand how the editor works.

To edit an XML document, Xopus needs at least two other files: an XSLT stylesheet, which defines how the wysiwyg view looks, and an XML Schema, which defines the structure of the XML document.

When Xopus starts, it creates a new stylesheet based on the stylesheet you supplied. This new stylesheet helps Xopus keep track of where each piece of content in the wysiwyg view originally came from in your document. For instance your document may have a title that is shown as a large bold header at the top of the wysiwyg view. Xopus knows that the text in this large bold header is the same as the title text in your document. So if you change the text in this large bold header, Xopus updates the title of your document. When you decide to show a piece of content more than once, like headers in an index or table of contents, Xopus updates all occurences when one is changed. Your stylesheet may also sort or hide content without affecting the original document. The new stylesheet that Xopus creates understands this. When your stylesheet shows text, like labels, Xopus makes sure that text can't be changed and doesn't end up in your document.

Xopus uses the schema to offer editing options in the insert and delete menus. Xopus will only allow inserting more content if the document will still be valid after inserting it. Xopus will use this technique, which we call pre-validation, for all actions. So Xopus will never allow you to modify the document in such a way that it becomes invalid according to your schema. Sometimes Xopus can not automatically decide how to keep the document valid, for example when the schema specifies that content describing a person either contains a full name or first name, infix, or family name. Xopus shows a dialog in this case.