Quark Inc. has used Macworld Conference & Expo San Francisco to introduce QuarkXPress Markup Language (QXML), an open source XML schema that conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Document Object Model (DOM). Because QXML fully describes the QuarkXPress 6.5 file format in XML, developers will find it easier to create custom XTensions by using a variety of development platforms and languages, such as Java, AppleScript or Perl.
QXML describes each QuarkXPress project as an XML tree, enabling any changes to the XML files to automatically alter the project in real time. This allows XTensions modules to use a project’s complete content — in addition, developers can run query expressions with much less code if they use XPath queries, which weren’t available before because XTensions development had to be performed with C/C++.
The first version of QXML allows developer to read data from a QuarkXPress project, but in the next iteration, they will also be able to write data to those files. Quark has not provided a release for that enhancement. Certified QuarkXPress XTensions developers can request a QXML developer kit from Quark now; visit the QuarkAlliance XTensions developer Web site to learn more.