The forms editor is similar in function to that in Visual Basic, but lighter weight. Wood showed an embedded calendar control that comes with the editor. In the demo, a GUI window lets the user click to select a day of the month. The corresponding display is formatted, by preference, as Month Day, Year. In this example the XMetaL DOM talks to the IE DOM, and is mapped to the document DTD with a script.
Structure View Back by popular demand is a structure view of the document being edited.
The structure view is created by the use of a style sheet that cascades off the one used in the main editing window, permitting easy optimization of the skeletal view. What's more, users can define more than one structure view style sheet in order to accommodate different demands. The structure view window acts as a navigator for the document. Clicking at a point brings the edit cursor to the corresponding point in the document, but you cannot edit directly in the structure window. Interestingly, under the covers, XMetaL uses SGML inclusions to markup the changes.