TeXMLMate 1.3 Released

New in TeXMLMate 1.3: XML Catalog Support

There’s a new Catalog tab in the TeXMLMate palette that allows you to construct and edit an XML Catalogs for use when parsing XML with TeXMLMate.

XML Catalogs is an Oasis standard that allows you to map (usually remote) URIs used in XML documents to alternate (usually local) resources. XML Catalogs are themselves expressed in XML.

Most often, XML Catalogs are used to map remote DTD System Identifiers to a local copy of the dtd. For example, if you validate a lot of XHTML 1.0 Strict documents using TeXMLMate, you will probably want to download a personal copy of the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD and tell TeXMLMate to always use the local copy rather than the remote resource used at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-strict.dtd. This is not only allows much faster parsing/validating, but it also allows you to validate documents while you are offline.

Additionally, you could add custom changes to your local XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD which you might want to validate against.

Setting up the XHTML 1.0 example would look like this in the UI:

Although the process described here demonstrates most common use usage for XML Catalogs, they offer quite a bit more too. Check out the very readable XML Catalogs specification for more info, and let me know how this feature meets your needs.

A possible enhancement in the future might be to include many commonly-used DTD, XSDs, and RNGs (for XHTML and other XML vocabs) with the TeXMLMate download, and then explicitly offer these thru the UI. This might be nice and I’m considering it… it would significantly increase the download size though. For now you have total control over your personal XML Catalog and can add any schemas or resources you like.