Simple XML Viewer app

[scripting]

Re this post, if you have comments or questions, this is the place.

I would love to have a very simple XML viewer app. I have one that I don't like very much. The app would run in a web page or on a server (if so, must be a Node app). It takes a url parameter, displays the contents of the file, parsed and indented consistently, and uses the same display that GitHub uses to display code, though it doesn't need any of the GH features, just the appearance. Horizontal scrolling, not wrapping text. I would use it in my existing app, with credit of course. I need this because my work requires me to look at XML files. And as far as I know there isn't a great way to do that, and given all the XML that's out there (web pages are XML, RSS feeds are XML) it would make sense to solve this problem well, as a very useful upgrade to the user experience of the web.

[tedchoward]

If you add this to the css for your existing app, you'll get horizontal scrolling:

#idXmlViewer {
    overflow-x: scroll;
    white-space: pre;
}

[jgrisham]

Universal (and simple, dependancy-free) “puzzle-piece” tools such as this are a great idea!

• Having a bit of JS to drop into a page to neatly format and display XML would be great.
• Would the option to customize it for a specific style of XML (e.g. XHTML/HTML, OPML, RSS, Apple PLISTs, …) be useful or might that be an unnecessary complication?
• My memory is hazy, but I thought this could be done without Javascript using only XSLTs in some browsers (at least a few years ago).

I’ve used a browser extension for this (for XML and JSON) - perhaps mining existing extension sourcecode here on GitHub would provide a template for what you’re looking for.

• Bookmarklet code might also be a source of inspiration (we use one of those that pretty-prints {with color coding!} the current page source HTML in Safari on an iPad/iPhone, but it’s not an editor).

[scripting]

I found something that seems to do the job -- highlight.js.

And, having found one, now I can find others, like prism.js.

[scripting]

Problem solved.

http://scripting.com/2022/06/09.html#a170727

I used the Ace Editor in read-only mode.