Attached Link: http://www.altova.com

I've been doing some XML work lately, and I downloaded a couple of XML tools from Altova.com. They have a very nice site design, and it seems they use Poser to do a number of the illustrations on their site. The Poser stuff is very understated, using a grayscale, illustration-style design that works quite well. Even the splash screen for the tool I'm using (XML Spy) has what looks like a Poser render as part of the design!

What exactly is XML? Can one use it in conjunction with Poser? TIA. Adrian

Attached Link: http://www.w3.org/XML/

XML is a data format.

Poser uses it for some of it's configurations files.

Oh boy... XML doesn't really have anything to do with Poser or 3D modeling. It is a file format that is used for marking up data and exchanging it across the internet. It is a fairly new technology that underlies a lot of websites and new applications known as "web services". XML is part of a whole other world of computer activity. Like the world of 3D modelling, it has lots of twisty little branches, niches and sub-categories. XML files are text files that include markup, much like HTML files. But while in HTML, the markup specifies what the text should look like, in XML the markup specifies what the text is about. So it's possible for machines to read the text, "understand" it and transform it according to rules. It's also easier for people to read the file, since it's somewhat self-describing. For example, in HTML you can mark text as bold and the web browser will know to render that text in boldface. But the web browser doesn't know what that boldface text represents. In XML you mark text as "filename" or "booktitle". The browser can then apply formatting based on rules (filename=Courier font, booktitle=italics) but it can also do things like compile a list of all the filenames or do a search for the author of every book. Browsers can read XML, but its more common for XML to be used by servers or dedicated programs to create human-readable data such as web pages. I'm using it to do technical documentation. When it works right, it lets you write your documentation once, then automatically make it available in a variety of formats (web pages, printed docs, application help, etc.) If Poser's text-based file formats like CR2 were re-written to use XML, they'd be easier to work with for both people and 3rd-party programs. But since that would require a fairly substantial re-write of Poser, and would break all the existing 3rd party tools that work with these files, we're not likely to see it happen.

Hi nruddock - Didn't know Poser used XML for config files. Interesting!

"Didn't know Poser used XML for config files."

Both P5 and P6 use it to hold the list of Runtimes and GUI details.

Do a search for *.xml in your main Runtime to find where the files are.

The GUI ones are best left alone, but being able to manipulate LibraryConfig.xml with programs etc. is very useful.