[melloyellow]

I have a noob question about skins? How are they rendered to screen? Are they pure .xml files? Is the engine built into the XBMC application to render them? If so, could I build a pure .xml website and convert it the xbmc skin?

[Jezz_X]

well they are specific custom xml and images. you can't just use any old web page xml you have to use the format and layout as specified in the online manual

[melloyellow]

Thanks for the quick response Jezz.
So your saying they are custom built for XBMC and images are stored in a format only XBMC understands? So I could never use a XML editor to build skins because some tags are custom to XBMC and it would not be able to see the finished product?

[Jeroen]

Thanks for the quick response Jezz.
So your saying they are custom built for XBMC and images are stored in a format only XBMC understands? So I could never use a XML editor to build skins because some tags are custom to XBMC and it would not be able to see the finished product?

The images are just jpg´s/gif´s/bmp´s but they are compressed into an .xpr file when you build/compile the skin. Although that is not obligatory, it speeds up the loading of textures significantly.
The tags are custom to XBMC, but that´s kind of the point of xml, to have big flexibility and not be bound to standard tags. With the website you mention you probable are referring to xhtml, which is a really different story and used wrongly in 99% of the websites using xhtml.

And sure you could use any editor you would like, why would´t that be possible? I use this one: http://www.e-texteditor.com/
Hell you could use notepad if you´re masochistic

[Gamester17]

http://www.xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Skinning_XBMC
http://www.xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Category...evelopment

As always please begin by reading the manual then ask specific questions