PAD

Portable Application Description is a machine-readable document format designed by the Association of Shareware Professionals.

It allows authors to provide product descriptions and specifications to online sources in a standard way, using a standard data format, a simplified subset of XML, that will allow webmasters and program librarians to automate program listings. PAD saves time for both authors and webmasters.

Each field in the specification has a regular expression (regex) associated with it. The regex acts as a constraint on the field: if the regex matches, the field value is legal and if it fails to match, the field and the PAD file as a whole are out of spec. Only files where all fields in the file pass validation are properly called PAD files.

The simplifications in PAD over XML are primarily PAD does not use name/value pairs in tags. All tags are attribute-free. This is less expressive than XML but easier to parse. The official PAD spec uses unique tags. To extract the fields in the official spec, it is not necessary to descend through the tag path. However, if multiple languages are represented in a single PAD file, then correct parsing does require descending though the tag path because leaf tags are duplicated for each language supported.

External links

• Official PAD site
• The Official PAD specification
• The Official PAD validator
• 30 or so free and commercial PAD products, services, and links
• About PAD files (Software Industry Professionals)
• PAD Validation Tool
• Online PAD Generator

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