Monday, April 24, 2006

working with XML

I know XML is a great technology but I never tried to learn more than needed. I was just using it for configuration file. The greatness about XML is it doesn't complain, unless you use standard library and your XML tag doesn't confirm to the standards. Recently I am working on an application that will tranform ascii font to unicode, in nepali. In nepali, the fonts are not standard so mapping of one font is not necessarily the same as for another font. The solution is to create XML file for each font. I used XML to replace text files I was using previously. I need to make sure that XML file is valid, I am thinking of releasing it soon to the public and the people should be able to create a new XML file if needed or the change the existing one as required. This great technology has provided XSD that will confirm the validity of XML file. I spent almost 1 hour to write xsd file manually, peering into examples and the source xml file. It worked and just in time I found a tool that will automatically generate xsd from source xml file. This tool xsd.exe is bundled with .net SDK framework. I am really enjoying xml. It's a great tool with lots of tools and libraries for manipulating it and it indeed has a tremendous potentials.

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