[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] a simpler document type definition language?
hi everybody. i like the idea of SML. but i think it is not of so big importance for "normal" programmers: if they don't like attributes, they just don't use it. but a really important thing to every user of XML is how to specify your fileformat. both, DTD and Schemas open you a lots of possibilities to specify your fileformat. but they are quite complicated. and it's not easy to write a program that validates a xml document (i think). so, what do you guys think about a simplified document type definition language? the simplest form i can think of would look something like this: (examples in DTD syntax) there are only 4 types of elements: - empty elements <!ELEMENT name1 EMTPY > - elements that contain data <!ELEMENT name2 (#PCDATA) > - list elements <!ELEMENT name3 (name1|name2|name3|name4)* > - structural elements of a fixed length <!ELEMENT name4 ((name1|name2),name3,name4,(name5|name6|name7)) > maybe that's a bit too restrictive, but i think it is useful for a lot of applications. and it is really easy to "validate" a document. If the user only uses these constructs, he can be sure that the format can easily be handled by a program. i defined a simple document definition language, based one the 4 basic element types. and wrote a small xml editor that can edit xml files which are defined in this language. at the moment, there are two formats defined: one for the rules themseves, with an DTD export filter, and one for a subset of the functionality of CSS, with a CSS export filter. download the source at http://www.netmen.ch/wullschleger/xml/Simple.zip ! And let me know what you think. Thanks. Juerg Wullschleger email: jurg@m... xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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