A posting from Rick Jelliffe announces support for RELAX NG in the Topologi Collaborative Markup Editor. The Topologi application is "a high-productivity XML and SGML editor for professional publishing teams; it is written in 100% pure Java and uses the Jing native interface. The editor also supports XML DTDs, XML Schemas, Schematron (including phases), and the Topologi NII (NamedInformationItem) schema formats. All these schemas can be put in an XAR file (a ZIP format for distributing document types and application code), and the editor will upload them over a network or between peers, so deploying schemas to systems should be pretty easy. The editor will be shipping with RELAX NG as one of the supplied applications; however it is not an IDE but targeted at data capture for the same kinds of publishing uses that SGML has succeeded in. This beta version is not considered feature-complete, but is being released with the goal of soliciting early feedback from users. Subsequent development is expected to provide undo, spell-checking, red-lining, context-sensitive sidebars, better collaborative authoring features, better support for ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language), etc. Interested parties may register for the beta program.

Related note: James Clark recently released several (provisional) RELAX NG enhancements. Jing [a validator for RELAX NG implemented in Java; an adaptation of the validator for TREX, written on top of SAX2] now supports the RELAX NG compact syntax directly if you use the -c option. Trang is a program for translating RELAX NG schemas into other formats; in particular, this can be used to translate RELAX NG into DTDs and to translate the non-XML syntax into the standard syntax. "Trang aims to produce human-understandable schemas; it tries for a translation that preserves all aspects of the input schema that may be significant to a human reader, including the definitions, the way the schema is divided into files, annotations and comments... In the future, James plans to add support for additional input and output formats, as well as extend the subset of RELAX NG that can be translated into DTDs... Both Jing and Trang have been updated to be consistent with the new syntax specification; in particular they support the new annotations syntax..."