>A couple of years ago, there were some messages on this forum about the
>possibility of WPTools using XML as a native format. Since then, I
>haven't seen anything about this. I'm in desperate need of a rich edit
>component whose underlying file format is xml; will WPTools do this, or
>does anyone know of any other component that can do it?
If native XML is just the storing of the par and char properties in
XML nodes this could be done using WPTools and the included XML class
but I see no real improvement here. WPTools would be the only
application which understand it.
Instead the XMLFile unit which loads and saves XHTML has been further
developed and improved. WPTools is now able to load and save XHTML
data and store the properties in the style="..." parameter of most
nodes. The new CSS class loads and saves the CSS data easily - it is
the major improvement in V4.2 apart from the support for right-to-left
writing. The advantage of XHTML/CSS is that other HTML readers can
understand it. In the beginning it was using XML + CSS2 but I found
no application which hanbdled the CSS2 information good enough so I
stayed with XHTML. The difference is mainly that in XHTML some nodes
have use a predefined formatting - most important tables and lists.
Julian Ziersch
