Yesterday, I had the opportunity to read more carefully the press release made back in January 2005 to announce QuarkXPress Markup Language (QXML).
My first guess, before clicking on the link, was that QXML would be an XML vocabulary.
Wrong guess!
QXML appears to be an XML schema of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Document Object Model (DOM)
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Although the press release doesn’t give a definition of this term (new to me), its benefits are detailed:
With QXML, the new DOM schema for QuarkXPress, developers can dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of a QuarkXPress project using a DOM interface. XTensions modules can be more versatile because they can use a project’s complete content, including all formatting, style sheets, hyphenation, and justification specifications.
A PDF white paper further explains:
One of the goals of an open-standard DOM is to produce common methods for accessing, modifying, creating, and deleting content within a DOM schema. If you are familiar with one particular DOM, understanding and working with another DOM is easy because you are already familiar with the common methods and metaphors applicable to all DOMs. This commonality gives the DOM a distinct advantage over traditional C/C++ application programming interfaces (APIs).
I did quite a lot of searches both on the Quark’s web site and on the Internet and did not see any reference to the possibility of directly using the XML document or any description of the XML vocabulary itself.
To me, it looks like Quark is just missing the point of XML.
XML is about letting anyone read documents in a text editors and write them through print statements…
Whether you like it or not, you just can’t publish documents in XML and still constrain developers to use your own API, only available to your official partners on your company web site and working only on the platforms and languages that you support!
And since you can’t avoid that people use their XML format directly, you should rather document it…
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