<html> <head> <title>Mini-XML Programmers Manual, Version 2.5</title> <meta name='copyright' content='Copyright 2003-2008'> <meta name='author' content='Michael R. Sweet'> <meta name='keywords' content='XML, C, C++, library'> </head> <body> <h1 align='right'><a name='INTRO'><img src="0.gif" align="right" hspace="10" width="100" height="100" alt="0"></a>Introduction</h1> <p>This programmers manual describes Mini-XML version 2.5, a small XML parsing library that you can use to read and write XML data files in your C and C++ applications.</p> <p>Mini-XML was initially developed for the <a href='http://gutenprint.sf.net/'>Gutenprint</a> project to replace the rather large and unwieldy <tt>libxml2</tt> library with something substantially smaller and easier-to-use. It all began one morning in June of 2003 when Robert posted the following sentence to the developer's list:</p> <blockquote><em>It's bad enough that we require libxml2, but rolling our own XML parser is a bit more than we can handle.</em></blockquote> <p>I then replied with:</p> <blockquote><em>Given the limited scope of what you use in XML, it should be trivial to code a mini-XML API in a few hundred lines of code.</em></blockquote> <p>I took my own challenge and coded furiously for two days to produced the initial public release of Mini-XML, total lines of code: 696. Robert promptly integrated Mini-XML into Gutenprint and removed libxml2.</p> <p>Thanks to lots of feedback and support from various developers, Mini-XML has evolved since then to provide a more complete XML implementation and now stands at a whopping 3,441 lines of code, compared to 103,893 lines of code for libxml2 version 2.6.9.</p> <p>Aside from Gutenprint, Mini-XML is used for the following projects/software applications:</p> <ul> <li><a href='http://www.cups.org/'>Common UNIX Printing System</a></li> <li><a href='http://www.cups.org/ddk/'>CUPS Driver Development Kit</a></li> <li><a href='http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net'>ZynAddSubFX</a></li> </ul> <p>Please email me (mxml @ easysw . com) if you would like your project added or removed from this list, or if you have any comments/quotes you would like me to publish about your experiences with Mini-XML.</p> <h2>Organization of This Document</h2> <p>This manual is organized into the following chapters and appendices:</p> <ul> <li>Chapter 1, "<a href='#INSTALL'>Building, Installing, and Packaging Mini-XML</a>", provides compilation, installation, and packaging instructions for Mini-XML.</li> <li>Chapter 2, "<a href='#BASICS'>Getting Started with Mini-XML</a>", shows how to use the Mini-XML library in your programs.</li> <li>Chapter 3, "<a href='#ADVANCED'>More Mini-XML Programming Techniques</a>", shows additional ways to use the Mini-XML library.</li> <li>Chapter 4, "<a href='#MXMLDOC'>Using the mxmldoc Utility</a>", describes how to use the <tt>mxmldoc(1)</tt> program to generate software documentation.</li> <li>Appendix A, "<a href='#LICENSE'>Mini-XML License</a>", provides the terms and conditions for using and distributing Mini-XML.</li> <li>Appendix B, "<a href='#RELNOTES'>Release Notes</a>", lists the changes in each release of Mini-XML.</li> <li>Appendix C, "<a href='#REFERENCE'>Library Reference</a>", contains a complete reference for Mini-XML, generated by <tt>mxmldoc</tt>.</li> <li>Appendix D, "<a href='#SCHEMA'>XML Schema</a>", shows the XML schema used for the XML files produced by <tt>mxmldoc</tt>.</li> </ul> <!-- NEED 10 --> <h2>Notation Conventions</h2> <p>Various font and syntax conventions are used in this guide. Examples and their meanings and uses are explained below:</p> <dl> <dt><code>lpstat</code><br> <code>lpstat(1)</code></dt> <dd>The names of commands; the first mention of a command or function in a chapter is followed by a manual page section number.<br><br></dd> <dt><var>/var</var><br> <var>/usr/share/cups/data/testprint.ps</var></dt> <dd>File and directory names.<br><br></dd> <dt><tt>Request ID is Printer-123</tt></dt> <dd>Screen output.<br><br></dd> <dt><kbd>lp -d printer filename ENTER</kbd></dt> <dd>Literal user input; special keys like <kbd>ENTER</kbd> are in ALL CAPS.<br><br></dd> <dt>12.3</dt> <dd>Numbers in the text are written using the period (.) to indicate the decimal point.<br><br></dd> </dl> <!-- NEED 10 --> <h2>Abbreviations</h2> <p>The following abbreviations are used throughout this manual:</p> <dl> <dt>Gb</dt> <dd>Gigabytes, or 1073741824 bytes<br><br></dd> <dt>kb</dt> <dd>Kilobytes, or 1024 bytes<br><br></dd> <dt>Mb</dt> <dd>Megabytes, or 1048576 bytes<br><br></dd> <dt>UTF-8, UTF-16</dt> <dd>Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit or 16-bit<br><br></dd> <dt>W3C</dt> <dd>World Wide Web Consortium<br><br></dd> <dt>XML</dt> <dd>Extensible Markup Language<br><br></dd> </dl> <!-- NEED 12 --> <h2>Other References</h2> <dl> <dt>The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-18578-1</dt> <dd>The definition of the Unicode character set which is used for XML.<br><br></dd> <dt><a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/'>Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third Edition)</a></dt> <dd>The XML specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)<br><br></dd> </dl> <!-- NEED 6 --> <h2>Legal Stuff</h2> <p>The Mini-XML library is copyright 2003-2008 by Michael Sweet.</p> <p>This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the <a href='#LICENSE'>GNU Library General Public License</a> as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.</p> <p>This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Library General Public License for more details.</p> </body> </html>