RE: Concise Format for EXI Grammar

Thanks Stephen,

You are right in many respects, and your enthusiasm still motivates me in my doing things. :-)

-taki


From: Stephen Williams [mailto:sdw@lig.net]
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2012 12:21 AM
To: public-exi@w3.org
Subject: Re: Concise Format for EXI Grammar

While not included in the spec, I have always felt that an "externalized metadata object" was important for this and other reasons.  I continue to feel that it is a mistake that it was left out, but that won't surprise anyone.

Stephen

On 3/7/12 6:49 PM, Yusuke DOI wrote:
Carie,

Thanks for clarification. I don't find apparent interoperability problems so far. My concern is the learning cost before make things work. EXI spec is good and clear I think, but still needs certain amount of effort to understand correctly.

When someone just want to make it work in some field, it's far better for him/her if s/he can start from a pre-compiled grammar. It can be implementation specific, but I don't find a reason to avoid some 'non-normative' reference serialization model. And I believe if we want to make more use of EXI in the world (my concern is on embedded systems), make it easy to start is very effective strategy.

Regards,

Yusuke

(2012/03/08 3:36), Carine Bournez wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 04:49:12AM +0900, Yusuke DOI wrote:

Dear EXI gurus,

Is there any intermediate format to describe EXI grammar?

As I'm working for several EXI-related projects including SEP2, I'm
feeling it's very convenient if we can share EXI grammar in well-defined
format. The format used in EXI spec is very descriptive, but I guess
that grammar notation is for humans.

If there's machine-readable (e.g. in plain text or XML) intermediate
format for EXI grammars, I believe we can reduce troubles on
spec-understanding stage by sharing a good grammar between
implementations. Then people can focus on implementations for various
devices of their own.


The EXI 1.0 specification does not define a format to exchange grammars
between processors. It specifies how to build the grammars in a non-ambiguous
way, so that a grammar exchange is not needed. The grammar notation used in the
specification is for implementers of EXI processors and it has no
machine-readable serialization. In some applications it may be interesting
to define a serialized format of the grammars in use, but such a format
would be specific to each use case to suit best the application needs.

If you encounter particular interoperability issues about grammars, we
welcome your feedback and will do our best to clarify the specification
wording.



--
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