But the familiarity is a good starting point. This one is interesting, and quite useful. This combination both lets you see without ambiguity what the markup structure of a document is, and also lets you see a good approximation of at least on likely final rendering of an XML document. The element rendering is configurable using CSS, as discussed below. Another optional view is available as a separate pane.
Navigation is synchronized between the two panes.
Between all the views, and combinations thereof, XMetal is a versatile and comfortable XML editing environment. XMetal gives you a good interface for modifying and creating these CSS documents, such as automatically configuring the appearance of the element at the current cursor. From the look of things, the rendering is probably done by calls to the same DLL's Internet Explorer uses, since IE5.5 renders things the same way given the same stylesheet. These panes are naturally optional, but when enabled they show a list of all the valid insertions at the current cursor location. Assuming you want to export your XML documents to more traditional viewable formats, you have several options.