Serna Free is a powerful but simple XML editor which has a very user friendly interface and is useful for somebody who has minimal experience with XML editors. The appearance of the editor is more like a word processor and it is very easy to learn and use. It has a WYSIWYG interface which helps in designing the output properly.
The editor is meant for those people who do not want to spend too much time in learning to use the product and its options. Multiple language option is available with the editor and the supported languages include Italian, French, Chinese and German apart from English. It also has spell checking in multiple languages.
Serna Free supports several document formats such as XHTML, NITF, Docbook and a few others. It also has other features like a help facility which is context sensitive and a simple form of editing which is drag and drop. Another useful feature is ContentMap which allows you to view the document in a tree structure.
Another very interesting function of the feature ContentMap is that you can change the position / order of the documents by dragging and dropping the elements into different root / tree all together ! In fact, you can drag and drop your elements in other open XML documents as well ! And after doing this, you do not have to ground up go on checking if the XML is valid, as there is an internal validation that happens in Serna XML editor, which ensures your XML is valid and if not it highlights it then and there.
Serna Free is primarily designed for small and non commercial users such as education and home business. The supported tags are unlimited and it is normally not used for building web applications. Using Serna Free it is easy to exchange data among web applications, a feature popular with commercial users.