If Devonthink were able to read the xml data into into its data store and integrate the management of each file’s metadata, this would be a true two-way system. Having xml be the native metadata format for DT would of course allow the easy import of the type of journal articles described above, and would allow the user to add further comments or notes as custom fields if they so desired. I guess I could imagine it a tremendously powerful feature if devonthink could somehow allow any file in the database to be wrapped or accompanied by an xml file that would allow keywords, categories, notes, or other metadata creation info to be added to any file in the database, and for this info to be ‘exposed’ or at least exportable as xml. Your suggestions is more sophisticated and uses the potential of XML, but may be, one can achieve the same goal with similar ease but without DT as an XML validator. This may be integrated in the search window, since phrases to exclude might be another helpful feature in other cases as well. Then one may put in all tags with jokers that can be ignored. Perhaps this could be done without XML-awareness, just as a new option “exclude the following strings from search:”. That type definition would include a list of tags to include or exclude in indexing, an application to open the files with, and a template for displaying it inside DT. It seems that you want DT being aware of the DTD or similar documents in order to perform more sophisticated searches: There are cheap apps like EditiX which would do that easily. What I would like to see is something like the following: I would select a few XML files and tell DT to make an XML data type definition from them. I like kh’s idea of XML integration very much, and I agree that this format will become overwhelmingly important in the near future. the risx format used by refDB), then it could be managed/indexed in DT while all the processing and conversion could be left to external tools. If the citation data were stored in some XML format (e.g. XML support would also help with another issue that has been mentioned here before: bibliography management with DT. New XML files would then be assigned to those types automatically. For most purposes, the set of tags used, and/or the set of tags used most frequently, is enough to decide what to do with an XML file, and DT is pretty good at doing that kind of classification. DTDs or schemas might seem like the obvious choice, but many XML files don’t use any. Identifying XML formats: both of the features I mentioned would require some way to identify the type of XML file. Moreover, I would like to be able to have certain tags not indexed at all, for example tags that occur in huge numbers but refer to data that is not human-friendly. This is fine in many cases, but it would also be nice to be able to search for specific tag/value combinations. Indexing XML data: at the moment, DT seems to index just the text values of nodes. That would obviously require some configurability, perhaps through scripts. Opening XML files: it would be nice if “open” would run some program appropriate for the XML data in a particular file. While DT handles XML pretty well as just another file format, I would love to see more XML specific support. More and more of the data I deal with is stored in XML files, and I guess I am not alone with this.
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