lisp/nxml/README

   1 This is a new major mode for GNU Emacs for editing XML documents. It
   2 supports editing well-formed XML documents and also provides
   3 schema-sensitive editing of XML documents using RELAX NG Compact
   4 Syntax.
   5
   6 To use this, you need GNU Emacs version 21.x, preferably 21.3. GNU
   7 Emacs version 20 will not work properly, nor will XEmacs.
   8
   9 To get started, do
  10
  11   M-x load-file <RET> rng-auto.el <RET>
  12
  13 This defines the necessary autoloads.  Now, visit a file containing
  14 an XML document, and do
  15
  16   M-x nxml-mode
  17
  18 Now do
  19
  20   C-h m
  21
  22 for information on how to use nxml-mode.
  23
  24 The beginnings of a manual are in nxml-mode.info.  You can read this
  25 using
  26
  27   C-u M-x info RET nxml-mode.info RET
  28
  29 It's also installed as an entry at the end of the top-level info
  30 directory.  So you can read it with C-h i as usual.
  31
  32 You can use test.valid.xml and test.invalid.xml as examples of valid
  33 and invalid XML documents.
  34
  35 To get things automatically loaded each time you start Emacs, add
  36
  37   (load "~/nxml-mode-200YMMDD/rng-auto.el")
  38
  39 to your .emacs, where ~/nxml-mode-200YMMDD is the directory containing
  40 the .elc files.  Note that rng-auto.el does not load all of the
  41 nxml-mode code; it merely sets things up so that all the features of
  42 nxml-mode will be autoloaded properly.  You should not try to autoload
  43 rng-auto.el itself.
  44
  45 To use nxml-mode automatically for files with an extension of xml,
  46 xsl, rng or xhtml, add
  47
  48   (setq auto-mode-alist
  49         (cons '("\\.\\(xml\\|xsl\\|rng\\|xhtml\\)\\'" . nxml-mode)
  50               auto-mode-alist))
  51
  52 to your .emacs.
  53
  54 If you edit XML using iso-8859-N encodings other than iso-8859-1 and
  55 you are running Emacs 21.3 or later, then I recommend enabling
  56 unify-8859-on-decoding-mode, by adding
  57
  58   (unify-8859-on-decoding-mode)
  59
  60 to you .emacs.
  61
  62 To get validation and schema-sensitive editing, you need a RELAX NG
  63 Compact Syntax (RNC) schema for you document. The schema directory
  64 includes some schemas for popular document types.
  65
  66 For more on RELAX NG, see
  67
  68   http://relaxng.org
  69
  70 For a tutorial on RELAX NG Compact Syntax, see
  71
  72   http://relaxng.org/compact-tutorial.html
  73
  74 For automatically creating RNC schemas, I recommend my Trang program:
  75
  76   http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang.html
  77
  78 You can use this to
  79
  80 - infer an RNC schema from an instance document;
  81
  82 - convert a DTD to an RNC schema;
  83
  84 - convert a RELAX NG XML syntax schema to an RNC schema.
  85
  86 To convert a RELAX NG XML syntax (.rng) schema to a RNC schema, you
  87 can also use the XSLT stylesheet from
  88
  89   http://www.pantor.com/download.html
  90
  91 To convert a W3C XML Schema to an RNC schema, you need first to
  92 convert it to RELAX NG XML syntax using Sun's RELAX NG converter tool
  93 rngconv (built on top of MSV). See
  94
  95   https://msv.dev.java.net/
  96
  97 The file NEWS describes recent changes.
  98
  99 Please use the list
 100
 101   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/emacs-nxml-mode/
 102
 103 for bug reports, discussion. I will announce all new versions there.
 104
 105 James Clark
 106 http://www.jclark.com/contact.html