Reply To: Editing XHTML in Xmetal

[Derek Read]

Yes, you can do this. Whether it effective is obviously subjective (so you'll want an answer from someone that actually does this daily and not me). You will obviously not get any wiz-bang features a dedicate HTML editing tool will give you (unless you code them yourself as part of a customization), but you will get perfectly valid XHTML.

You do need to provide the right flavour of DTD or XSD for the type of XHTML you want to edit (strict, transitional, etc).

Not many clients do this that I know of, but there are quite a few that have created their own customizations (if you don't create a CSS and CTM then you will be using auto-generated versions of those files which may not give you styling you might expect). Rather than try to build a CSS from scratch (or from the auto-gen one) for use with the XHTML DTD you end up choosing you might begin with something like this:
http://davidwalsh.name/firefox-internal-rendering-css

Here's an example (written years ago by Richard Ishida when he was still using XMetaL version 2 or 3 I think): http://rishida.net/articles/xmetal-setup

In some cases XHTML is also incorporated into a larger document type (often using XSD namespaces) and not worked on as pure XHTML.

In many cases XHTML is produced as an output (as with the large percentage of our clients are now authoring in DITA).

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