A COLLADA Toolbox - Game Development Tools - page 124

XSLT can be used to create XML documents, so it can be used to reformat
COLLADA documents; for example, it is quite easy to filter a document to only
the elements that are necessary for the next stage of the content pipeline. If your
application has no use for some of the information, then there is no need to carry
all this information down to the final user, which would only make his loading time
longer for no reason.
For more advanced users, there is a scripting language dedicated to processing
XML documents and returning either XML or XHTML or JSon, that can be exe-
cuted by a database server or by the client application. For more information see
the XQuery language, [W3C 94b].
9.12 Conclusion
This article demonstrated the power of XML and the many free available tools
that can be used with COLLADA. In fact, those tools are commonly available and
quite easy to use, as they are the core of data technology for pretty much all the
documents we are using on a daily basis (try to rename a Microsoft Word .docx
into .zip, and look inside! Try with Powerpoint and Excel too).
COLLADA's strength lies in the fact that it is an open standard, built with
open standards, and with the right toolbox, offers everyone the capability to man-
age, transform, and investigate its data. This article should give programmers the
confidence that it easy to open the hood and look inside a COLLADA document,
no matter its size or where it came from. More tools can be added when needed
to this toolbox in order to help tracking problems or to process the content as
part of the pipeline. Maybe this chapter will energize a small group of people to
create a C# cross-platform COLLADA toolbox application based on all the infor-
mation provided and the existing implementations. The author can be contacted
at [e-mail] .
Bibliography
[Barnes and Arnaud 04] Mark Barnes and Remi Arnaud. “SIGGRAPH 2004
COLLADATechTalk.”Availableat http://www.collada.org/public forum/
files/COLLADASigGraphTechTalkWebQuality.pdf , 2004.
[Bourret 11] Ronald Bourret. “XML Database Products: Native XML
Databases.” XMLandDatabases. Availableat http://www.rpbourret.
com/xml/ProdsNative.htm ,2010.
[Bubasoft 11] Buba Software. “XPath Builder that Enables You to Evaluate
anXPathExpression.”Availableat http://www.bubasoft.net/xpathbuilder/
Xpathbuilder2.aspx ,2011.