JinnTap

Introduction

JinnTap is a rich-text editor for XML documents, delivered as a web component. Unlike other editors it keeps the XML structure intact: what you see in the editor maps directly onto the underlying XML.

XML elements are represented in the editor as HTML custom elements — for TEI XML this would be: <tei-div>, <tei-p>, <tei-hi>, and so on — preserving every attribute and structural feature. There is no lossy transformation step, so round-tripping a document through the editor does not silently drop markup it doesn't recognise (see Unknown elements).

JinnTap is meant to be customized to match your encoding needs and practice. It does not attempt to have a representation for every element or attribute in an XML schema. For TEI this would not even be possible: many elements are ambiguous and could be used as inline as well as block elements, while the editor requires a clear distinction.

In practice, you want to restrict the choices collaborators can make in a project to keep consistency. Therefore we only include the most common elements and very few global attributes in the default schemata. It's up to you to extend those — see Customizing the editor for a walkthrough.

How it works

Internally JinnTap builds on ProseMirror (via Tiptap). A single JSON configuration or schema declares:

Changing what the editor can do is therefore mostly a matter of editing the schema — see the Schema reference.

Where it runs

JinnTap is usually embedded into a larger application such as TEI Publisher 10, which handles loading and saving documents. The editor itself is purely client-side and doesn't need any server. The embedded demo instances included in this documentation are browser-only: edits are kept in IndexedDB on this device (not uploaded anywhere), and you are asked on reload whether to restore your local draft. See Local document storage for how to add this to your own embed.

Next steps