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INFO-DIR-SECTION Programming & development tools.
START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
* XmlAda: (xmlada)         	An XML processing library for Ada '95
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The Ada95 Unicode and XML Library
*********************************

The Ada95 XML Library

   Version 0.5

   Date: $Date: 2001/10/30 15:01:17 $

   Copyright (C) 2000-2001, Emmanuel Briot This document may be copied,
in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, as is or with
alterations, provided that (1) alterations are clearly marked as
alterations and (2) this copyright notice is included unmodified in any
copy.

* Menu:

* Introduction::
* The Unicode module::
* The Input module::
* The SAX module::
* The DOM module::
* Using the library::

 --- The Detailed Node Listing ---

The Unicode module

* Glyphs::
* Repertoires and subsets::
* Character sets::
* Character encoding schemes::
* Misc. functions::

The Input module

The SAX module

* SAX Description::
* SAX Examples::
* SAX Parser::
* SAX Handlers::

The DOM module

Using the library


File: xml.info,  Node: Introduction,  Next: The Unicode module,  Prev: Top,  Up: Top

Introduction
************

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is
completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic
SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is
now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation
and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

   This library includes a set of Ada95 packages to manipulate XML
input. It implements the XML 1.0 standard (see the references at the
end of this document), as well as support for namespaces and a number
of other optional standards related to XML.

   We have tried to follow as closely as possible the XML standard, so
that you can easily analyze and reuse languages produced for other
languages.

   This document isn't a tutorial on what XML is, nor on the various
standards like DOM and SAX. Although we will try and give a few
examples, we refer the reader to the standards themselves, which are all
easily readable.

   ??? Explain what XML is


File: xml.info,  Node: The Unicode module,  Next: The Input module,  Prev: Introduction,  Up: Top

The Unicode module
******************

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

   Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters
and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode
was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for
assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough
characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several
different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single
language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the
letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.

   These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two
encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use
different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially
servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is
passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs
the risk of corruption.

   Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what
the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as
Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys
and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML,
Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the
official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many
operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The
emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools
supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software
technology trends.

   The following sections explain the basic vocabulary and concepts
associated with Unicode and encodings.

   Most of the information comes from the official Unicode Web site, at
<http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr17>.

   Part of this documentation comes from <http://www.unicode.org>, the
official web site for Unicode.

   Some information was also extracted from the "UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ"
by M. Kuhn, available at <???>.

* Menu:

* Glyphs::
* Repertoires and subsets::
* Character sets::
* Character encoding schemes::
* Misc. functions::


File: xml.info,  Node: Glyphs,  Next: Repertoires and subsets,  Up: The Unicode module

Glyphs
======

A glyph is a particular representation of a character or part of a
character.

   Several representations are possible, mostly depending on the exact
font used at that time. A single glyph can correspond to a sequence of
characters, or a single character to a sequence of glyphs.

   The Unicode standard doesn't deal with glyphs, although a suggested
representation is given for each character in the standard. Likewise,
this module doesn't provide any graphical support for Unicode, and will
just deal with textual memory representation and encodings.

   Take a look at the GtkAda library that provides the graphical
interface for unicode in the upcoming 2.0 version.


File: xml.info,  Node: Repertoires and subsets,  Next: Character sets,  Prev: Glyphs,  Up: The Unicode module

Repertoires and subsets
=======================

A repertoire is a set of abstract characters to be encoded, normally a
familiar alphabet or symbol set. For instance, the alphabet used to
spell English words, or the one used for the Russian alphabet are two
such repertoires.

   There exist two types of repertoires, close and open ones. The former
is the most common one, and the two examples above are such repertoires.
No character is ever added to them.

   Unicode is also a repertoire, but an open one. New entries are added
to it. However, it is guaranteed that none will ever be deleted from it.
Unicode intends to be a universal repertoire, with all possible
characters currently used in the world. It currently contains all the
alphabets, including a number of alphabets associated with dead
languages like hieroglyphs. It also contains a number of often used
symbols, like mathematical signs.

   The goal of this Unicode module is to convert all characters to
entries in the Unicode repertoire, so that any applications can
communicate with each other in a portable manner.

   Given its size, most applications will only support a subset of
Unicode.  Some of the scripts, most notably Arabic and Asian languages,
require a special support in the application (right-to-left
writing,...), and thus will not be supported by some applications.

   The Unicode standard includes a set of internal catalogs, called
collections. Each character in these collections is given a special
name, in addition to its code, to improve readability.

   Several child packages (Unicode.Names.*) define those names. For
instance:

Unicode.Names.Basic_Latin
     This contains the basic characters used in most western European
     languages, including the standard ASCII subset.

Unicode.Names.Cyrillic
     This contains the Russian alphabet.

Unicode.Names.Mathematical_Operators
     This contains several mathematical symbols

   More than 80 such packages exist.


File: xml.info,  Node: Character sets,  Next: Character encoding schemes,  Prev: Repertoires and subsets,  Up: The Unicode module

Character sets
==============

A character set is a mapping from a set of abstract characters to some
non-negative integers. The integer associated with a character is called
its code point, and the character itself is called the encoded
character.

   There exist a number of standard character sets, unfortunately not
compatible with each other. For instance, ASCII is one of these
character sets, and contains 128 characters. A super-set of it is the
ISO/8859-1 character set.  Another character set is the JIS X 0208,
used to encode Japanese characters.

   Note that a character set is different from a repertoire. For
instance, the same character C with cedilla doesn't have the same
integer value in the ISO/8859-1 character set and the ISO/8859-1
character set.

   Unicode is also such a character set, that contains all the possible
characters and associate a standard integer with them. A similar and
fully compatible character set is ISO/10646. The only addition that
Unicode does other ISO/10646 is that it also specifies algorithms for
rendering presentation forms of some scripts (say Arabic), handling of
bi-directional texts that mix for instance Latin and Hebrew, algorithms
for sorting and string comparison, and much more.

   Currently, our Unicode package doesn't include any support for these
algorithms.

   Unicode and ISO 10646 define formally a 31-bit character set.
However, of this huge code space, so far characters have been assigned
only to the first 65534 positions (0x0000 to 0xFFFD). The characters
that are expected to be encoded outside the 16-bit range belong all to
rather exotic scripts (e.g., Hieroglyphics) that are only used by
specialists for historic and scientific purposes

   The Unicode module contains a set of packages to provide conversion
from some of the most common character sets to and from Unicode. These
are the Unicode.CCS.* packages.

   All these packages have a common structure:

  1. They define a global variable of type `Character_Set' with two
     fields, ie the two conversion functions between the given
     character set and Unicode.

     These functions convert one character (actually its code point) at
     a time.

  2. They also define a number of standard names associated with this
     character set. For instance, the ISO/8859-1 set is also known as
     Latin1.

     The function `Unicode.CCS.Get_Character_Set' can be used to find a
     character set by its standard name.

   Currently, the following sets are supported:
ISO/8859-1 aka Latin1
     This is the standard character set used to represent most Western
     European languages including: Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch,
     English, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Irish,
     Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

ISO/8859-2 aka Latin2
     This character set supports the Slavic languages of Central Europe
     which use the Latin alphabet. The ISO-8859-2 set is used for the
     following languages: Czech, Croat, German, Hungarian, Polish,
     Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian.

ISO/8859-3
     This character set is used for Esperanto, Galician, Maltese and
     Turkish

ISO/8859-4
     Some letters were added to the ISO-8859-4 to support languages
     such as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. It is an incomplete
     precursor of the Latin 6 set.



File: xml.info,  Node: Character encoding schemes,  Next: Misc. functions,  Prev: Character sets,  Up: The Unicode module

Character encoding schemes
==========================

We now know how each encoded character can be represented by an integer
value (code point) depending on the character set.

   Character encoding schemes deal with the representation of a sequence
of integers to a sequence of code units. A code unit is a sequence of
bytes on a computer architecture.

   There exists a number of possible encoding schemes. Some of them
encode all integers on the same number of bytes. They are called
fixed-width encoding forms, and include the standard encoding for
Internet emails (7bits, but it can't encode all characters), as well as
the simple 8bits scheme, or the EBCDIC scheme. Among them is also the
UTF-32 scheme which is defined in the Unicode standard.

   Another set of encoding schemes encode integers on a variable number
of bytes. These include two schemes that are also defined in the Unicode
standard, namely Utf-8 and Utf-16.

   Unicode doesn't impose any specific encoding. However, it is most
often associated with one of the Utf encodings. They each have their own
properties and advantages:

Utf32
     This is the simplest of all these encodings. It simply encodes all
     the characters on 32 bits (4 bytes). This encodes all the possible
     characters in Unicode, and is obviously straightforward to
     manipulate. However, given that the first 65535 characters in
     Unicode are enough to encode all known languages currently in use,
     Utf32 is also a waste of space in most cases.

Utf16
     For the above reason, Utf16 was defined. Most characters are only
     encoded on two bytes (which is enough for the first 65535 and most
     current characters). In addition, a number of special code points
     have been defined, known as surrogate pairs, that make the
     encoding of integers greater than 65535 possible. The integers are
     then encoded on four bytes.  As a result, Utf16 is thus much more
     memory-efficient and requires less space than Utf32 to encode
     sequences of characters. However, it is also more complex to
     decode.

Utf8
     This is an even more space-efficient encoding, but is also more
     complex to decode. More important, it is compatible with the most
     currently used simple 8bit encoding.

     Utf8 has the following properties:
        * Characters 0 to 127 (ASCII) are encoded simply as a single
          byte.  This means that files and strings which contain only
          7-bit ASCII characters have the same encoding under both
          ASCII and UTF-8.

        * Characters greater than 127 are encoded as a sequence of
          several bytes, each of which has the most significant bit
          set. Therefore, no ASCII byte can appear as part of any other
          character.

        * The first byte of a multibyte sequence that represents a
          non-ASCII character is always in the range 0xC0 to 0xFD and
          it indicates how many bytes follow for this character. All
          further bytes in a multibyte sequence are in the range 0x80
          to 0xBF. This allows easy resynchronization and makes the
          encoding stateless and robust against missing bytes.

        * UTF-8 encoded characters may theoretically be up to six bytes
          long, however the first 16-bit characters are only up to
          three bytes long.



   Note that the encodings above, except for Utf8, have two versions,
depending on the chosen byte order on the machine.

   The Ada95 Unicode module provides a set of packages that provide an
easy conversion between all the encoding schemes, as well as basic
manipulations of these byte sequences. These are the Unicode.CES.*
packages.  Currently, four encoding schemes are supported, the three
Utf schemes and the basic 8bit encoding which corresponds to the
standard Ada strings.

   It also supports some routines to convert from one byte-order to
another.

   The following examples show a possible use of these packages:

     Converting a latin1 string coded on 8 bits to a Utf8 latin2 file
     involves the following steps:
     
        Latin1 string  (bytes associated with code points in Latin1)
          |    "use Unicode.CES.Basic_8bit.To_Utf32"
          v
        Utf32 latin1 string (contains code points in Latin1)
          |    "Convert argument to To_Utf32 should be
          v         Unicode.CCS.Iso_8859_1.Convert"
        Utf32 Unicode string (contains code points in Unicode)
          |    "use Unicode.CES.Utf8.From_Utf32"
          v
        Utf8 Unicode string (contains code points in Unicode)
          |    "Convert argument to From_Utf32 should be
          v         Unicode.CCS.Iso_8859_2.Convert"
        Utf8 Latin2 string (contains code points in Latin2)


File: xml.info,  Node: Misc. functions,  Prev: Character encoding schemes,  Up: The Unicode module

Misc. functions
===============

The package Unicode contains a series of `Is_*' functions, matching the
Unicode standard.

Is_White_Space
     Return True if the character argument is a space character, ie a
     space, horizontal tab, line feed or carriage return.

Is_Letter
     Return True if the character argument is a letter. This includes
     the standard English letters, as well as some less current cases
     defined in the standard.

Is_Base_Char
     Return True if the character is a base character, ie a character
     whose meaning can be modified with a combining character.

Is_Digit
     Return True if the character is a digit (numeric character)

Is_Combining_Char
     Return True if the character is a combining character. Combining
     characters are accents or other diacritical marks that are added
     to the previous character.

     The most important accented characters, like those used in the
     orthographies of common languages, have codes of their own in
     Unicode to ensure backwards compatibility with older character
     sets. Accented characters that have their own code position, but
     could also be represented as a pair of another character followed
     by a combining character, are known as precomposed characters.
     Precomposed characters are available in Unicode for backwards
     compatibility with older encodings such as ISO 8859 that had no
     combining characters. The combining character mechanism allows to
     add accents and other diacritical marks to any character

     Note however that your application must provide specific support
     for combining characters, at least if you want to represent them
     visually.

Is_Extender
     True if Char is an extender character.

Is_Ideographic
     True if Char is an ideographic character. This is defined only for
     Asian languages.



File: xml.info,  Node: The Input module,  Next: The SAX module,  Prev: The Unicode module,  Up: Top

The Input module
****************

This module provides a set of packages with a common interface to access
the characters contained in a stream. Various implementations are
provided to access files and manipulate standard Ada strings.

   A top-level tagged type is provided that must be extended for the
various streams. It is assumed that the pointer to the current character
in the stream can only go forward, and never backward. As a result, it
is possible to implement this package for sockets or other strings where
it isn't even possible to go backward. This also means that one doesn't
have to provide buffers in such cases, and thus that it is possible to
provide memory-efficient readers.

   Two predefined readers are available, namely `String_Input' to read
characters from a standard Ada string, and `File_Input' to read
characters from a standard text file.

   They all provide the following primite operations:

`Open'
     Although this operation isn't exactly overriden, since its
     parameters depend on the type of stream you want to read from, it
     is nice to use a standard name for this constructor.

`Close'
     This terminates the stream reader and free any associated memory.
     It is no longer possible to read from the stream afterwards.

`Next_Char'
     Return the next Unicode character in the stream. Note this
     character doesn't have to be associated specifically with a single
     byte, but that it depends on the encoding chosen for the stream
     (see the unicode module documentation for more information).

     The next time this function is called, it returns the following
     character from the stream.

`Eof'
     This function should return True when the reader has already
     returned the last character from the stream. Note that it is not
     guarantee that a second call to Eof will also return True.

   It is the responsability of this stream reader to correctly call the
decoding functions in the unicode module so as to return one single
valid unicode character. No further processing is done on the result of
`Next_Char'. Note that the standard `File_Input' stream can
automatically detect the encoding to use for a file, based on a header
read directly from the file.

   However, it is always possible to override the default through a
call to `Set_Encoding'. This allows you to specify both the character
set (Latin1, ...) and the character encoding scheme (Utf8,...).

   The user is also encouraged to set the identifiers for the stream
they are parsing, through called to `Set_System_Id' and
`Set_Public_Id'. These are used when reporting error messages.


File: xml.info,  Node: The SAX module,  Next: The DOM module,  Prev: The Input module,  Up: Top

The SAX module
**************

* Menu:

* SAX Description::
* SAX Examples::
* SAX Parser::
* SAX Handlers::


File: xml.info,  Node: SAX Description,  Next: SAX Examples,  Up: The SAX module

Description
===========

Parsing XML streams can be done with two different methods. They each
have their pros and cons. Although the simplest, and probably most usual
way to manipulate XML files is to represent them in a tree and
manipulate it through the DOM interface (see next chapter).

   The Simple API for XML is an other method that can be used for
parsing.  It is based on a callbacks mechanism, and doesn't store any
data in memory (unless of course you choose to do so in your
callbacks). It can thus be more efficient to use SAX than DOM for some
specialized algorithms.  In fact, this whole Ada XML library is based
on such a SAX parser, then creates the DOM tree through callbacks.

   Note that this module supports the second release of SAX (SAX2),
that fully supports namespaces as defined in the XML standard.

   SAX can also be used in cases where a tree would not be the most
efficient representation for you data. There is no point in building a
tree with DOM, then extracting the data and freeing the tree occupied
by the tree. It is much more efficient to directly store your data
through SAX callbacks.

   With SAX, you register a number of callback routines that the parser
will call them when certain conditions occur.

   This documentation is in no way a full documentation on SAX. Instead,
you should refer to the standard itself, available at
<http://www.megginson.com/SAX/>.

   Some of the more useful callbacks are `Start_Document',
`End_Document', `Start_Element', `End_Element', `Get_Entity' and
`Characters'. Most of these are quite self explanatory. The characters
callback is called when characters outside a tag are parsed.

   Consider the following XML file:

     <?xml version="1.0"?>
     <body>
       <h1>Title</h1>
     </body>

   The following events would then be generated when this file is
parsed:

     Start_Document           Start parsing the file
     Start_Prefix_Mapping     (handling of namespaces for "xml")
     Start_Prefix_Mapping     Parameter is "xmlns"
     Processing_Instruction   Parameters are "xml" and "version="1.0""
     Start_Element            Parameter is "body"
     Characters               Parameter is ASCII.LF & "  "
     Start_Element            Parameter is "h1"
     Characters               Parameter is "Title"
     End_Element              Parameter is "h1"
     Characters               Parameter is ASCII.LF & "  "
     End_Element              Parameter is "body"
     End_Prefix_Mapping       Parameter is "xmlns"
     End_Prefix_Mapping       Parameter is "xml"
     End_Document             End of parsing

   As you can see, there is a number of events even for a very small
file.  However, you can easily choose to ignore the events you don't
care about, for instance the ones related to namespace handling.


File: xml.info,  Node: SAX Examples,  Next: SAX Parser,  Prev: SAX Description,  Up: The SAX module

Examples
========

There are several cases where using a SAX parser rather than a DOM
parser would make sense. Here are some examples, although obvisouly
this doesn't include all the possible cases. These examples are taken
from the documentation of libxml, a GPL C toolkit for manipulating XML
files.

   * Using XML files as a database

     One of the common usage for XML files is to use them as a kind of
     basic database, They obviously provide a strongly structured
     format, and you could for instance store a series of numbers with
     the following format.

          <array> <value>1</value> <value>2</value> ....</array>

     In this case, rather than reading this file into a tree, it would
     obviously be easier to manipulate it through a SAX parser, that
     would directly create a standard Ada array while reading the
     values.

     This can be extended to much more complex cases that would map to
     Ada records for instance.

   * Large repetitive XML files

     Sometimes we have XML files with many subtrees of the same format
     describing different things. An example of this is an index file
     for a documentation similar to this one. This contains a lot
     (maybe thousands) of similar entries, each containing for instance
     the name of the symbol and a list of locations.

     If the user is looking for a specific entry, there is no point in
     loading the whole file in memory and then traverse the resulting
     tree. The memory usage increases very fast with the size of the
     file, and this might even be unfeasible for a 35 megabytes file.

   * Simple XML files

     Even for simple XML files, it might make sense to use a SAX
     parser. For instance, if there are some known constraints in the
     input file, say there are no attributes for elements, you can save
     quite a lot of memory, and maybe time, by rebuilding your own tree
     rather than using the full DOM tree.


   However, there are also a number of drawbacks to using SAX:

   * SAX parsers generally require you to write a little bit more code
     than  the DOM interface

   * There is no easy way to write the XML data back to a file, unless
     you  build your own internal tree to save the XML.   As a result,
     SAX is probably not the best interface if you want to load,
     modify and dump back an XML file.

     Note however than in this Ada implementation, the DOM tree is
     built through  a set of SAX callbacks anyway, so you do not lose
     any power or speed by using  SAX.


File: xml.info,  Node: SAX Parser,  Next: SAX Handlers,  Prev: SAX Examples,  Up: The SAX module

The SAX parser
==============

The basic type in the SAX module is the SAX.Readers package. It defines
a tagged type, called `Reader', that represents the SAX parser itself.

   Several features are define in the SAX standard for the parsers. They
indicate which behavior can be expected from the parser. The package
`SAX.Readers' defines a number of constant strings for each of these
features. Some of these features are read-only, whereas others can be
modified by the user to adapt the parser. See the `Set_Feature' and
`Get_Feature' subprograms for how to manipulate them.

   The main primitive operation for the parser is `Parse'. It takes an
input stream for argument, associated with some XML data, and then
parses it and calls the appropriate callbacks. It returns once there are
no more characters left in the stream.

   Several other primitive subprograms are defined for the parser, that
are called the callbacks. They get called automatically by the `Parse'
procedure when some events are seen.

   As a result, you should always override at least some of these
subprogram to get something done. The default implementation for these
is to do nothing, exception for the error handler that raises Ada
exceptions appropriately.

   An example of such an implementation of a SAX parser is available in
the DOM module, and it creates a tree in memory. As you will see if you
look at the code, the callbacks are actually very short.

   Note that internally, all the strings are encoded with a unique
character encoding scheme, that is defined in the file
`sax-encodings.ads'. The input stream is converted on the fly to this
internal encoding, and all the subprograms from then on will receive
and pass parameters with this new encoding. You can of course freely
change the encoding defined in the file `sax-encodings.ads'.


File: xml.info,  Node: SAX Handlers,  Prev: SAX Parser,  Up: The SAX module

The SAX handlers
================

We do not intend to document the whole set of possible callbacks
associated with a SAX parser. These are all fully documented in the
standard itself, and there is little point in duplicating this
information.

   However, here is a list of the most frequently used callbacks, that
you will probably need to override in most of your applications.

`Start_Document'
     This callback, that doesn't receive any parameter, is called once,
     just before parsing the document. It should generally be used to
     initialize internal data needed later on. It is also garanteed to
     be called only once per input stream.

`End_Document'
     This one is the reverse of the previous one, and will also be
     called only once per input stream. It should be used to release
     the memory you have allocated in Start_Document.

`Start_Element'
     This callback is called every time the parser encounters the start
     of an element in the XML file. It is passed the name of the
     element, as well as the relevant namespace information. The
     attributes defined in this element are also passed as a list.
     Thus, you get all the required information for this element in a
     single function call.

`End_Element'
     This is the opposite of the previous callback, and will be called
     once per element. Calls to `Start_Element' and `End_Element' are
     garanteed to be properly nested (ie you can't see the end of an
     element before seeing the end of all its nested children.

`Characters and Ignore_Whitespace'
     This procedure will be called every time some character not part
     of an element declaration are encounted. The characters themselves
     are passed as an argument to the callback. Note that the white
     spaces (and tabulations) are reported separately in the
     Ignorable_Spaces callback in case the XML attribute `xml:space'
     was set to something else than `preserve' for this element.


   You should compile and run the `testsax' executable found in this
module to visualize the SAX events that are generated for a given XML
file.


File: xml.info,  Node: The DOM module,  Next: Using the library,  Prev: The SAX module,  Up: Top

The DOM module
**************

A default SAX implementation is provided in the tree_readers file,
through its Parse function. This reads an XML stream and creates a tree
in memory.  The tree can then be manipulated through the DOM module.

   Note that the encodings.ads file specifies the encoding to use to
store the tree in memory. Full compatibility with the XML standard
requires that this be UTF16, however, it is generally much more
memory-efficient for European languages to use UTF8. You can freely
change this and recompile.

   What is the Document Object Model?

   The Document Object Model is a platform- and language-neutral
interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access
and update the             content, structure and style of documents.
The document can be further processed and the results of that
processing can be incorporated back into the             presented
page. This is an overview of DOM-related materials here at W3C and
around the web.

   Why the Document Object Model?

   "Dynamic HTML" is a term used by some vendors to describe the
combination of HTML, style sheets and scripts that allows documents to
be             animated. The W3C has received several submissions from
members companies on the way in which the object model of HTML
documents should be             exposed to scripts. These submissions
do not propose any new HTML tags or style sheet technology. The W3C DOM
WG is working hard to make             sure interoperable and
scripting-language neutral solutions are agreed upon.

   The DOM (Document Object Model) is a set of subprograms to create and
manipulate XML trees in memory.

   You can create such a tree through the tree_readers.Parse function.

   Only the Core module of the DOM standard is currently implemented,
other modules will follow.


File: xml.info,  Node: Using the library,  Prev: The DOM module,  Up: Top

Using the library
*****************

XML/Ada is a library. When compiling an application that uses it, you
thus need to specify where the specifications are to be found, as well
as where the libraries are installed.

   There are several ways to do it:

   * The simplest is to use the `xmlada-config' script, and let it
     provide the list of switches for `gnatmake'. This is more
     convenient on Unix systems, where you can simply compile your
     application    with

          gnatmake main.adb `xmlada-config`

     Note the use of backticks. This means that `xmlada-config' is
     first executed, and then the command line is replaced with the
     output of    the script, thus finally executing something like:

          gnatmake main.adb -Iprefix/include/xmlada -largs -Lprefix/lib \
            -lxmlada_input_sources -lxmlada_sax -lxmlada_unicode -lxmlada_dom

     Unfortunately, this behavior is not available on Windows (unless
     of course    you use a Unix shell). The simplest in that case is
     to create a    `Makefile', to be used with the `make' command, and
     copy-paste    the output of `xmlada-config' into it.

     `xmlada-config' has several switches that might be useful:

       1. `--sax': If you this flag, your application will not be
          linked against the DOM module. This might save some space,
          particularly       if linking statically. This also reduces
          the dependencies on external       tools.

       2. `--static': Return the list of flags to use to link your
          application statically against Xml/Ada. Your application is
          then       standalone, and you don't need to distribute
          XMl/Ada at the same time.

       3. `--static_sax': Combines both of the above flags.


   * On Windows system, you might also simply want to register once and
     for    all the library in the Windows registry, with the command
     `gnatreg'.     This means that `GNAT' will automatically find the
     installation    directory for the XML/Ada.

   * If you are working on a big project, particularly one that includes
       sources in languages other than Ada, you generally have to run
     the three    steps of the compilation process separately (compile,
     bind and then link).     `xmlada-config' can also be used,
     provided you use one of the    following switches:

       1. `--cflags': This returns the compiler flags only, to be used
               for instance with `gcc'.

       2. `--libs': This returns the linker flags only, to be used for
               instance with `gnatlink'.





Tag Table:
Node: Top224
Node: Introduction1164
Node: The Unicode module2263
Node: Glyphs4727
Node: Repertoires and subsets5504
Node: Character sets7582
Node: Character encoding schemes11068
Node: Misc. functions15944
Node: The Input module17914
Node: The SAX module20652
Node: SAX Description20861
Node: SAX Examples23754
Node: SAX Parser26403
Node: SAX Handlers28338
Node: The DOM module30538
Node: Using the library32470

End Tag Table
