Editing XML and XSL

Editing XML/XSL is easy. For simple documents, anyway. But what about ginormous XML files with wild and crazy structures?

Try the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s XML notepad, available for download completely free: Download XML Notepad 2007. XML Notepad provides handy-dandy tree view editing of XML documents (even big ‘uns), with built-in XSL preview so you can see what everything looks like after an XSL transform.

But alas, the XSL preview doesn’t automatically reload the XSL document for you. Which is a real pain if you like to switch back and forth between edit and preview mode to see what the output looks like after each subtle change.

It turns out there is an easy way to view previews. Just stick an xml-stylesheet node at the top of your XML document, like so…

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="Stylesheet.xsl"?>

…and load the XML file in IE. Then you can hit F5 all day long, and IE will appropriately refresh the XSL output.