soustedit

Soustedit is a concept and framework for editing structured textual data that prioritizes preserving the document’s structural integrity during edits. Rather than editing plain text lines directly, soustedit models the document as a structured representation (such as a tree or graph) and applies changes as structured operations. This enables fine-grained diffs, easier validation, and better support for collaboration.

Key features include structure-aware editing, schema validation, reversible operations, and a plug-in architecture that supports multiple formats such as XML, JSON, and Markdown with metadata. The editing workflow typically separates the user interface from the document model, translating user actions into a formal delta that is applied to the authoritative representation and then serialized back to the target format.

To manage concurrent work, soustedit commonly uses collaboration techniques such as operational transformation (OT) or conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) to merge edits while maintaining structural correctness. This approach helps prevent structural breaks and maintains consistency across contributors.

Applications span technical and legal documentation, configuration files, and any domain where preserving syntax and hierarchy during edits is important. Soustedit is described in theoretical and experimental discussions as a family of approaches to structured editing rather than a single standardized product.

See also: Structured editors, Structured text, OT, CRDT, Version control, Document schema.