Re: Draft iXML minutes, 4 March 2025

"I think the spec implies that if a grammar could produce not well-formed XML, the grammar isn't conformant."


I think you may be right, depending on what "any" means here:


 Grammars must be written so that any serialization of a parse tree produced from the grammar is well-formed XML


and one interpretation would disallow my ABC example, which I would consider wrong; so we may have to review that sentence.


Steven

On Tuesday 18 March 2025 15:04:47 (+01:00), Steven Pemberton wrote:



" I think a single root element is relatively easy to work out; but suppressed elements make it a little harder.
… I think we should think about removing the statement from the spec or we should talk about changing those to static errors."

I am a strong believer in static error checking, and we should make the class of static errors as large as possible. I try to give warnings about potential errors (such as orphan rules), and I even warn about certain classes of ambiguity that can be spotted statically.

But I think while there are some errors that are clearly in the static domain, such as undefined rules, and some that are probably dynamic, such as ambiguity, some are in a murky could-be-static, could-sometimes-be-dynamic area, and we should avoid making them normatively static, and leave that to smart implementations that can spot subclasses that are discoverable statically.

Steven




On Tuesday 18 March 2025 14:15:49 (+01:00), Steven Pemberton wrote:






which I would rather not have to do.
By which I mean, that this error should at best be a warning.


Steven




On Tuesday 18 March 2025 13:50:26 (+01:00), Steven Pemberton wrote:


Looks like you had a great discussion in the status reports section. Sorry I missed it.


Bethan says: "What I'm interested in working on are tools that will treat your grammar as a generator rather than a recognizer."


I've written several of these in the past (for instance, when I wrote a version of Eliza, the Rogerian psychotherapist, I wrote another program to generate random paranoid ramblings for Eliza to respond to (https://cwi.nl/~steven/Talks/2024/09-oxford/ai.html#L2734)


In fact, they are quite easy to write, since it is just a recursive random path through the grammar tree. This is the complete code, where 'thing' is either a terminal or nonterminal ('choice' returns a random element of a sequence, in this case returning a random alternative from a rule):


HOW TO GENERATE thing 
 FROM grammar:
    SELECT:
        
nonterminal(thing):
            FOR symbol 

IN choice grammar[thing]:
            
    GENERATE symbol FROM grammar
        
ELSE:
            WRITE thing, " 
"


And you generate one rambling with "GENERATE '<sentence>' FROM sentences"


Steven


On Tuesday 04 March 2025 16:42:47 (+01:00), Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:



> Hi folks,

>

> Draft minutes are online:

>

> https://www.w3.org/2025/03/04-ixml-minutes.html

>

> Be seeing you,

> norm

>

> --

> Norm Tovey-Walsh

> Saxonica

>

>