STEP 3 It's All Coming Together Now.
I know that the last page was tough to get through. But the advantage of learning it
this way is that you will be able to troubleshoot problems in the future when you have
huge xml files. Proper linking of files is the most important part of skinning Winamp 3
without having problems. If you understood the last section and have a firm grasp
of the concept of linking files then this next section will be a breeze and you will begin
to understand how files come together to create a skin.
In the last section we directed the skinning engine to read all the default xml files except
the Player.xml and the associated files connected to it.
Now we must give the skinning engine a file to find.
So once again. Fire up your Windows explorer and go to your skin folder that you created in the
last step. Right now you should have a skin folder with the skin.xml file in it. It's time to
create the folder that will hold all of the rest of your xml files.
Create a new folder called xml
Thats it. Now we need to put something in this folder. Paticularly the player.xml
Lets create that file now.
Open up your text editor again and lets get started. This one is fairly straight forward and again
if you understood the last section then this will make sense to you.
In this new text file you will be directing the skin engine to 2 additional files.
Plus telling it what part of the skin you are creating. Lets have a look at the code.
[include file="player-elements.xml"/]
[container id="main" name="Main window"]
[include file="player-normal.xml"/]
[/container]
Thats right, this means that we need to create 2 more xml files because we just pointed the
skinning engine to 2 more files. The player-element.xml and the player-normal.xml
In addition we have told the skin engine that we are working on the main container.
This is pretty simple stuff don't you think?
This is what our chain of files looks like so far.
------>player-elements.xml
Skin.xml --------> player.xml -------> ------------------------------
----- - ------>player-normal.xml -
- -
- Main container -
------------------------------
If you understand this at all. You now understand that we are well on our way to creating a
container called main. This is the same thing you would do to create a custom container,
but we won't get into that now. You should now save this file in the xml folder that you created earlier.
In the next step we will be defining what is going into this container called main.
The elements of disaster and the jigsaw of perception.
Next page ->
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