Portable Application Description

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 simple XML schema that allows 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.

PAD uses a simplified XML syntax that does not use name/value pairs in tags. All tags are attribute-free. The official PAD specification uses unique tags. To extract the fields in the official specification, it is not necessary to descend through the tag path. 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 list of PAD-enabled sites
• The Official PAD validator
• PAD Extensions Directory
• 30 or so free and commercial PAD products, services, and links
• PAD database and graphics updated weekly
• About PAD files (Software Industry Professionals)
• PAD Validation Tool
• Online PAD Generator
• PAD Submission