Quark was among those making major announcements at the Macworld Conference & Expo San Francisco, introducing the QuarkXPress Markup Language (QXML).

QXML is an XML schema that conforms to theWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C)Document Object Model (DOM), defined by the W3C as “a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of documents.” QXML fully describes the QuarkXPress file format in XML, allowing developers to create QuarkXPress 6.5 XTensions software using industry standards and any number of development platforms and languages.

"While C and C++ are powerful development languages, developers now use a wide variety of development languages. Porting software from other applications and platforms to and from C and C++ can be a lengthy and cost-prohibitive task," said QuarkXPress Product Manager Tim Banister. "The creation of QXML radically changes the landscape for XTensions development and lets a brand new group of developers create custom XTensions software for QuarkXPress—and with it, an even wider variety of solutions for our customers. Quark is absolutely committed to open standards, and this demonstrates the strength of that commitment."

Now developers can dynamically access and update QuarkXPress project content, structure, and style using a DOM interface. As a result, XTensions modules can use a project's complete content—formatting, style sheets, hyphenation, and justification specifications included—and developers can run query expressions using XPath queries and only a few lines of code.

"For many years, valuable content has been locked in proprietary file formats, while the move towards multi-channel publishing has dictated that it can no longer be used just for print," said Quark's VP of Product Development Juergen Kurz. "With an industry-standard methodology for describing the QuarkXPress file format, our customers have greater security because their QuarkXPress content can be easily integrated into today's complex multi-channel publishing environments."

With this first version of QXML, you can read data from a QuarkXPress project. The next version will also allow you to write data to QuarkXPress projects.

The QXML developer kit is now available to certified QuarkXPress XTensions developers.