Someone who had read my bog entry about Quark and XML has asked me if I knew whether Adobe had followed the same principles for the support of XML in InDesign.
I am not a specialist of this product range and I had no answer to this question.
Anyway, some quick research on Adobe’s web site and on Google makes me think that even though I find it disappointed that Quark (like so many others) is making this confusion between markup languages and APIs, InDesign hasn’t even reached this point yet.
Adobe’s web site describes InDesign’s flexible XML support
as:
Enhanced XML import: Import XML files with flexible control using the Structure view and Tags palette. Automatically flow XML into tagged templates or import and interactively place it. Enhanced options give you greater import control and make it easier to achieve the results you want.
Linked XML files: Create a link to an XML file on import, so you can easily update your placed XML content whenever the source XML content is updated.
XML automation: Automatically format XML on import by mapping XML tags to paragraph and character styles in your document, or more easily reuse existing content by mapping text styles to XML tags and then exporting the XML content.
XML table tagging: Easily apply XML tags to InDesign tables. Then import XML content into the tables or export it from them.
These are useful features that are detailed in a XML.com article, but they do not expose their complete document model in XML, either directly nor even through a XML Schema of the DOM
.
That might be the reason why someone that defines himself as a die hard InDesign fan
has commented this article to say that Adobe InDesign is behind QuarkXPress in terms of XML features
.
This comment has been written in August, 2004 but, has far as I can see on the web, this is still the case today.
See also: