possible additions to our existing examples?

Some of the talks and discussions at Balisage last week have made me
wonder: would it be a good idea to set about adding material to our
existing collection of sample iXML grammars?

  - a Relax NG schema (and optionally a DTD and XSD schema) for
    the XML output of the parser?

  - an XSLT stylesheet (or an iXML grammar) to re-serialize the XML in
    the original notation?

  - rudimentary documentation of the XML vocabulary used in the parser
    output produced by the sample iXML grammar?

All of these may be helpful when people use iXML to move data in some
non-XML notation into XML to work with it, especially if they want to
use XML tools to modify the original data and write it back in the
original notation.  That may not always be terribly likely for the
sample grammars, but it may be worth while to make people aware that
these are things they may want to do for their own grammars.

A Relax NG schema can be generated from the vXML form of a grammar; the
ixml-to-rng.xsl stylesheet in my Gingersnap library provides a proof of
concept, and I have recently worked out ways to improve it (a discussion
of what is and is not feasible may be found at [1]).

I believe several people are working on automatic generation of
transformations to go from vXML back to the notation described by an
iXML grammar, but I believe that most existing transforms of that class
have been constructed manually.

Automatic generation of skeleton documentation is on my to-do list (but
it has been there for a while, so I make no promises -- real soon now).

Does it make sense to use the sample directory to show not just iXML
grammars but also tools for working with the output produced by the iXML
processor?

Michael

[1] https://github.com/cmsmcq/gingersnap/blob/main/doc/ixml-to-rng.org

-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com

Received on Friday, 9 August 2024 15:46:34 UTC