Re: Overview of Spec editing frameworks?

On 26/05/2010 13:00, Marc Schroeder wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> apologies for this beginner's question. I am the editor of EmotionML
> [1], which is currently a FPWD written in XHTML with CSS styles.
>
> I am all in favor of distilling things to their essence, and an
> XML-to-surface type of spec writing process would seem to fit that well.
> Now I am looking for documentation on this, and find the Grammars
> section of the Editors' home page [2], which points to XMLSpec; on this
> mailing list I find mention of other frameworks including ReSpec and
> ReSpec 2, which I don't find mentioned on that page...

xmlspec has been in use a long time (since before xml was a rec)
and is used by many current documents still being actively maintained 
xpath/xslt/xquery and mathml for example use (separately customised) 
versions of xmlspec.  ReSpec(2) is newer and being actively developed on 
this list at the moment as you probably noticed. It may be easier to use 
this starting from an xhtml base (as that's what it uses) although 
personally I've not tried it. Using a specific vocabulary such as 
xmlspec seems more natural to me, but clearly tastes differ:-)
xmlspec is particularly useful if generating multiple file or multiple 
format documents (MathML is published as html, xhtml+MathML and PDF 
(typeset by TeX) for example, from an xmlspec source.
>
> .... could anyone briefly point me to the available approaches,
> recommended best practice(s) etc.?
>
> Also, is there a recommended way of converting the current XHTML version
> into XML-based spec? Is rewriting everything by hand the only option?

It should be fairly easy to write (for a specific one-off document) an 
xslt stylesheet that takes the xhtml and writes it out as xmlspec, or 
for that matter writes it out as xhtml with ReSpec markup conventions.
>
> Thanks for any pointers, and best regards,
> Marc

David


respec is to be found here:

http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/respec2/






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Received on Wednesday, 26 May 2010 14:01:08 UTC