Good practices when writing a parser for a standard file format (such as ePub)
- by J-F L-R
I am considering writing an Android reader software that can read ePubs and display them. I checked the ePub standard documents. However, these contain a lot of information. So I am wondering what is the process of implementing a standard for a file format. What are the steps to get a working implementation without passing by parts of the standard? Are there any best practices?
Also, is it even possible to program this alone in a reasonable time?
From what I have already found out, ePub is basically a zip archive. That means I could probably use zlib to decompress it. The content is in XHTML and CSS, so I believe it should be possible to display it in a WebView. The parts that are missing are writing the code that can read the metadata and manage the non-standard XHTML extensions.