## Chapter 1. Presentation

XMLmind XML Editor Web Edition (XXEW for short) is a JavaScript implementation of XMLmind XML Editor running in the web browser, thus not requiring any installation on the user side.

#### Figure 1-1. A DITA `<concept>` opened in XXEW

Who will use it?

- XXEW is a strictly validating, near WYSIWYG, XML editor, featuring a streamlined, single document, user interface and having out of the box support for DITA , DocBook , XHTML and TEI Lite .
- XXEW is definitely not a programmer's tool and is intended to be used by technical writers, engineers and scholars in order to author topics —relatively small, relatively independent from each other, document chunks— which are part of large modular documents.

Who will deploy it?

- XXEW is essentially a 100% JavaScript, lightweight, software component which has been designed to be easily integrated into any information system (e.g. a CMS). As such it aims to serve the same purpose as rich text editors like TinyMCE or CKEditor , but in the context of structured editing. See Part II, Chapter 6, Section 1. Overview.
- An XML editor web application is included in the software distribution. Therefore, out of the box, XXEW may also be used to edit local and/or remote XML files. See The sample XML editor application included in the XXEW distribution.

### Differences with the desktop application

Desktop Application | Web Edition
- Requires installing the application on the user's computer. (No need to install Java™. A private Java runtime is included in most software distributions.) | Requires installing a very recent web browser on the user's computer.
  | ##### Restriction At the time of this writing only very recent Blink-based browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge and Gecko-based browsers like Firefox are supported. Apple Safari, which uses the WebKit engine, is currently not supported.
Requires installing a Java 11+ runtime and XXEW distribution on the server side and running `xxeserver`, which is XXEW backend. More about all these requirements in Chapter 2. How it works.
Multiple document user interface, adapted to authoring large, complex, modular, documents, including DITA maps or DocBook assemblies. | Single document user interface, adapted to authoring topics, articles, chapters, sections, etc.
| ##### Restriction Related restrictions: XXEW has less toolbar buttons, less menus, less menu items than its desktop counterpart. It also has less keyboard shortcuts and its keyboard shortcuts are somewhat different. XXEW cannot be used to insert element references (e.g. XInclude , DITA `@conref`) into a document.
No restrictions related to “local files”. | When editing a document stored in a file which is local to the computer running the web browser, XXEW cannot render image references (e.g. DITA `<image href="..."/>`) and cannot transclude element references. The reason is that, for security reasons, a web browser gives a web application very little access to the local file system.
Multiple views of the document being edited may be displayed side by side. These views are the tree view, styled views (each view being specified using a different CSS stylesheet), with or without visible tags, and the XML source view. | Only a single view of the document being edited is displayed at a time. It's possible to switch between the tree view and one of the styled views. Visible tags are not supported. The XML source view is not supported.
Spell checking is `@lang`/`@xml:lang` aware and automatically switches between dictionaries. | Spell checking is implemented by the web browser, which is not convenient to use in the context of multi-lingual documents.
Has advanced import DOCX, paste from MS-Word and paste from web browser facilities. Can convert XML to a variety of formats (PDF, Web Help, EPUB, RTF, ODT, DOCX, etc.) | Has no import or export facilities.
Has CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) support. Has right-to-left writing (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, etc) support. | Typing text using a CJK Input Method Editor (IME) works but has limitations and bugs(1). No right-to-left writing support.
Is also a MathML WYSIWYG editor. | MathML rendered on screen (by the web browser), but editable only using the tree view.
On Linux, the X Window Primary Selection is natively supported. | On Linux, the X Window Primary Selection is not natively supported by XXEW. This differs from HTML `<input type="text">` and `<textarea>` and may be surprising for the user of the web browser. However, an optional —crude— emulation is available and works on all platforms.

(1) | For example, it's not possible to replace the text selection simply by tying text using the IME.