[Gambas-user] 2 Questions

[Rob Kudla]

On Tue December 6 2005 18:09, johnf wrote:
> Not sure what you mean by DTD's.

A DTD is a "data type definition", which is basically a file 
format definition of an XML document which can be read 
programmatically (because the DTD itself is also an XML 
document.)  If someone releases an XML based file format and 
releases the DTD for that format, it becomes A LOT easier to 
make other programs work with that format.

Openoffice.org released the DTD's for their file formats along 
with the formats themselves, unlike certain companies who want 
you to sign NDA's or agree to other restrictions to use their 
DTD's.

A good starting point for understanding the OpenDocument format 
can be found here, though they gloss over the DTD:

http://books.evc-cit.info/odbook/book.html

The DTD files themselves are installed along with Openoffice.  On 
my machine they're located here:

/usr/lib/openoffice/share/dtd/

Gambas' gb.xml.libxml component has some DTD-related 
functionality, but I couldn't tell you what it does exactly.

It looks to me like XML is pretty much the ASCII of the future, 
so if you're looking to manipulate documents you'll want to 
learn how to deal with XML.  Good luck....

Rob