Apple

On 2007-08-27, at 23:16:12, Bruce Robertson wrote:

[1] Pure Virgin AppleScript

Thanks. I didn't figure PVA would work but I also didn't think we knew enough yet about the document format to do anything practical. So far looks like that's the case.

One thing you can try is to look in /Library/DTDs or the application bundle's Resources folder for files that have the suffix ".xsd". For instance OMM, the Spotlight document definition is here: <file:///System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Resources/MetadataSchema.xsd>

By the way, what's all the ls and sf and sfa stuff?

Well, it seems like someone's got a sense of humor because SFA is what folks get out of a PowerBall ticket that didn't win :-).

These are XML namespace identifiers. For XML document type definitions (schemas), namespaces serve to be able to construct a document type as an aggregate of several other document types (or portions thereof) in such a fashion that say a <table> definition from sub-document A would not be confused with a <table> definition from sub-document B.

In order to avoid collisions of names (like the users of File Maker Pro encounter with the 'read' symbol) yet allow a flexible naming method to identify the unique origin of a particular element or data-type, a mapping occurs between a nickname and a (hopefully) unique identifier <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier>. Thus to define these two different table elements and be able to use them in the same XML document, they are referred to by using their nickname as a prefix to the element. Say the nicknames are chosen to be a, and b. Then the document would refer to them as <a:table>…</a:table> and <b:table>…</b:table>.

So below, 'ls:document' is the main document type, it's nickname prefix is "ls', and it's mapped to: "http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/ls".

This is specified by the line: xmlns:ls="http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/ls". (xmlns=XML NameSpace).

Similarly, 'xmlns:sfa' maps the prefix 'sfa' to the URI "http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/sfa", etc.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ls:document xmlns:sfa="http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/sfa"
xmlns:sf="http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/sf"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:ls="http://developer.apple.com/namespaces/ls"
ls:version="72007061400" sfa:ID="LSDocumentModel-0"

References:
	>Re: iWork Numbers (From: Bruce Robertson <email@hidden>)