XML formats

Preface

XML is a derivative of SGML, and is used for stuctured storage of content and metadata.

The XML files are valid except for a couple of problems; there is no doctype at the beginning and where attributes have a numerical value, they are not surrounded in quotation marks.

None of the tags contain any content; they only have sub-tags and attributes. It is the attributes which store content, and all the attributes are named "value".

The XML files are used to implement the Collections feature. Each COL file specifies a single collection and hhcolreg.dat is used to store data on all collections on a machine.

There are three tags in hhctrl.ocx, that are yet to be seen in any of the XML formats; findmergedchms, showhomepage and homepage. At a guess these are likely to be meta-data tags from the COL format.