I'm not quite clear on what your goal is, and it's been a great many years since I've been a developer (or used Windows regularly). However, since no one else is commenting, I'll mention what I know.

Back in the day, Xerces was good, though hard to use. The C++ version runs on Linux and Windows, and can be found here: http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/index.html . There is a Java version here: http://xerces.apache.org/xerces2-j/index.html

I've heard good things about XML Spy. It's commercial, but has a 30 day trial, so if you need it short-term, it should work OK. It's here: http://www.altova.com/download/xmlspy/xml_editor_enterprise.html

If you're doing XSLT stuff, I can personally recommend Sablotron on Linux. It should work OK on Windows as well. It's here: http://www.gingerall.org/sablotron.html

Hope this helps, and sorry I'm not an expert.

Trying to accomplish? Hmmmm. Well, I need to somehow wrap my mind around or at least get a some bit of a handle on the wonderful wacky world of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), now that the SEC has this … um … exciting (yeah, that's the word: exiting) … new IDEA that companies will soon need to file their quarterly financial data reports in XBRL format, working, as I do, for a leader in the corporate financial document services industry. I figured that getting myself a rudimentary understanding of XML might be a good place to start. So I picked me up a book (Beginning XML, 4th Edition from Wrox) and am fumbling my way through it.

I appreciate the recommendation(s). Not sure if/whether/when XSLT will come back into the picture (we had a brief scare there a while back, so I have a couple of O'Reilly books and a Wrox book on that topic), but that thought seems to be on hold for the moment), but if it does I appreciate that recommendation as well. Thanks!

I'm mostly dealing with them embedded in SOAP packages at the moment, and I'm not sure about "validating", hence no useful advice I don't think.

Ah well. Thanks anyway.

Not so sure I qualify as techie... yet...

Suggestion is to make certain you are going with XML 1.1, but I bet you are already on that path.

I would highly suggest something open source... like these (read the license carefully if *work* is going to be using it):

http://www.sw8t.com/
http://www.philo.de/xml/
http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/index.html (looks like where guppiecat also suggests)

or a more complete list (so that you can see several versions and pretty much choose the direction you'd like to go):

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/13/schematools.html

I am finding I really like O-Reilly a lot. (Back to the Linux grind...) :)

Hey, you've always qualified as a techie in my mind, starchild_dsc. Just beginning to ramp up your knowledge base, it's true, but the ability, interest, and mind-set were certainly solidly in place by the time I met you. Probably even long before that.

Thanks for taking the time to think about my query and respond. As far as commercial use goes—yeah, I have firmly in mind that I'll need to connect with Marnie and the corporate IT folks if I need a tool with which to start doing any actual work—right now I'm just trying to learn XML … or at least, you know, get a bit of a handle on it. (See my reply above to guppiecat.)

Yeah, O'Reilly is the first place I turn when I want to learn. Finestkind.

sorry...was that english-ish?

:)

Nope, not really. It's actually neep-neep. That's why the headline read "Hey techies!"

I'm reading the same book as you and found the same problem. I did a little searching and found this xml validator at w3 schools -- I tried several others and compared the results to the book's results. This one agreed with the book and also gave understandable error messages (a real bonus!).

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_validator.asp

Thank you, thank you!
Who was that masked man?