This is the MAST version of a public domain xml processing package written by John Storrs. It aims to promote the wider use of xml for information capture and documentation. The package contains an xml parser, documentation generator, dtd generator, xml validator, with sample applications and associated xml documents. The applications include a simple tutorial which shows how easy it is to build and process an in-memory tree representing an xml document.
xml is a curate's egg of a standard, and the Practical XML project currently only handles the good bits. It focuses on the definition of hierarchical data structures using element and attribute markup. It handles the insertion of standard entities, but not user-defined entity definitions. Though it only covers a subset of the xml standard, the Practical XML package is useful in a wide range of applications.
The project software is written in Perl, an ideal language for text processing. The parser and system tools make extensive use of Perl regular expressions and other useful features of the language.
The package files are organised in 3 subdirectories: lib, containing the parser libraries, app containing system and demo applications, and doc containing this document.