Last October, when I was preparing an XML course, I was looking for a free,
simple XML editor which my students could also use at home for their
preparations.  The editor should be easy to install on the Windows family
of operating systems; it should be easy to use, robust, and support XML 1.0
validation.  However, all the free editors I looked at fall (often very)
short of at least one of these criteria.  Therefore, I decided to create a
teaching editor myself.  It took me some time to make it really robust, but
today's release 1.3 of what I call the "Open XML Editor" seems to be mature
enough to be announced here on this list.  It still lacks a lot of features
I would like to see in a perfect XML editor, but I hope that, in the
absence of alternatives, it will nevertheless be somewhat useful to
others.  A list of features, and download links for the binaries and the
source code can be found at the corresponding web-site at
"http://www.philo.de/xmledit/".

I am currently not sure whether I should continue improving this
editor.  Developing it is time consuming, and for professional XML editing
an author may be able to afford a commercial product.  However, if I get
enough hints that people are not only downloading but really using the
editor, in particular for teaching XML, it would encourage me to improve
it.  In this case, please drop me a few lines of feedback.

Dieter Köhler