T. van den Broek
The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) based at the Oxford University is one of the largest digital text archives in the world. Its main goal is to store texts that are digitised by scholars for re-usability. More and more, these texts are encoded in XML. The OTA also advises users on how to create digital texts, recommending scholars to use the Text Encoding Initiative standard (TEI) as the document model. However, little is known about which editors are best suitable for encoding the texts. This research addresses this question.
To answer this question a generic benchmark was developed that supports the user in choosing a suitable editor, given an XML document model and several types of users. The creation of this benchmark was based on the study of benchmarks for software in general, interviews with experts on XML, and standards for software evaluation by the ISO. The benchmark consists of three parts (features, usability and support). A list of XML editors was evaluated against the criteria in the three parts and ranked accordingly. With the benchmark, it is possible to rank the editors from most suitable to least suitable based on the requirements of each user group. The top-3 editors for each user type are then subjected to user tests.
The benchmark was applied to the following types of TEI users: “Advanced users in XML technology”; “Advanced users in XML encoding”; “Intermediate users in XML technology”; and “WYSIWYG authors”. This study revealed that the benchmark can be used to rank a variety of XML editors for the different user groups.
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