Portable Application Description

PAD or Portable Application Description is a machine-readable document format and specification designed by the Association of Shareware Professionals and introduced in 2000. The PAD specification is utilized by more than 40,000 software publishers of downloadable applications covering the Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems. The specification is managed by the ASP PAD Committee. PAD is a registered trademark of the Association of Software Professionals.

PAD allows software authors to provide standardized product descriptions and specifications to online sources in a standard way, using a simple XML schema that allows webmasters and program librarians to automate new program listings and update existing listings in their catalog. PAD saves time for both authors and webmasters, while allowing the specification to support the latest changes to operating systems and hardware.

PAD files most commonly have .XML or .PAD file name extension. 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.

Each field in the specification has a regular expression associated with it. The regular expression acts as a constraint on the field: if the it matches, the field value is legal and if it fails to match, the field and the PAD file as a whole do not conform to specification. Only files where all fields in the file pass validation are properly called PAD files.

The most current specification, version 4.00, was announced on December 1, 2012, replacing the prior version, 3.11 which was previously announced on June 12, 2010.

External links

• Official PAD site of the Association of Software Professionals
• Official PAD v4.0 Specification format
• Examples of the PAD format explained
• Official ASP Tool for Authoring, Validation and Publishing for PAD v4.0
• The Official Global PAD Repository
• The Official list of PAD-enabled sites
• The Official PAD validator for past PAD 3.x files
• Listings of formerly supported PAD Extensions
• 30 or so free and commercial PAD products, services, and links
• About PAD files (Software Industry Professionals)
• Third Party PAD v3.11 Validation Tool

See also

• Submission software