Re: machine readable properties

On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, 7:21:56 PM, Robin wrote:

RB> Yung-Fong Tang wrote:
>> Basically you want the Appendix F of CSS2 in a seperate plain text file, 
>> right?
>> 
>> It looks http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/css2.txt won't do the job because 
>> it contains other formatting information.

RB> Thanks for the pointer. It could do the job as it would be fairly easily 
RB> parsable by matching on the fixed width columns of the table and munging the 
RB> values back into lines.

RB> In the meantime I wrote a brute force Perl screen scraper (ah, that good old 
RB> '90s feel...) that finds regularities in the HTML of the spec to produce an XML 
RB> dump of the properties. I haven't yet checked that it makes much sense beyond 
RB> being WF. I've attached it in case anyone is interested (I can provide the 
RB> script too). Further parsing of the value spaces as well as recognition of 
RB> common options (yes, no, aural, N/A...) could be fairly easily added.

Excellent, we should have a similar file available from SVG specs. The
only addition I could think of would be an xlink:href on the
percentages element, pointing back to said prose if the content is
'see prose'.

Next step is to maintain the properties in that form and generate the
(portion of the) html spec from that rather than the other way round.


-- 
 Chris                            mailto:chris@w3.org