Re: Intent of ER-XML

On 27/02/2012 17:51, Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
> .... it's my feeling based on experience and intuition is that it's
> generally best to not mix a specification for a language with a
> specification for a processor for that language. When you do mix
> that way, you tend to wind up specifying as standard many details
> that weren't really core to your intent for the general case.

I'm interested to know what you think of the current draft in this
regard. My view is that it more or less does what you wish.

Mostly it is _just_ a description of a grammar. Because the grammar
rules are strange, it follows the html5 style of describing the grammar
by describing state transition rules in English rather than using a more
common formalism, but this is just a stylistic quirk that the html5 spec
has shown people get used to, rather than a fundamental problem.

The second phase is (currently) described as building a DOM tree but it
only uses the language of nodes and attributes, so DOM is just being
used as an abstract tree description. It doesn't use any methods from a
DOM API as far as I can see.

So long as the final wording makes it clear that it is conformant to
implement an xml-er parser by (say) representing the final output tree
by a series of sax events (or as a string representing a well formed
document) then I don't have any particular issues with the style in the
current draft.

The current draft doesn't really do anything (much) towards specifying a
processor (even one using a DOM AI) Nothing about how the nput is fed
in, or how the results and.or errors are fed back out.

David

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Received on Monday, 27 February 2012 18:19:42 UTC