Re: Scripting DTD's

What Aaron's talking about here is basically inventing a new kind of DTD, that describes programming languages. This would certainly not be an XML DTD or even an SGML DTD - one would have to add some hire parent on the tree, and perhaps "Programming DTD" and "SGML DTD" could be siblings.

This is an interesting idea; Microsoft must have some nod to this concept with their .Net architecture, given that the "CLR" is language agnostic, yet demands a basic feature set be supported (how is that feature set described?). However I've seen no details explaining how such metadata is maintained.

It may be worth the W3C's time - or more likely IEEE - to define a standard way of describing a language, since at some point there are really no new features, just different syntax. It would make it easier for client and server technologies to be language agnostic, rather than custom writing it each time (consider the PHP engine, which only works with PHP, versus Microsoft's ASP, which works with VBScript, JScript, Python, Perl and a few others - all of this support was custom coded). It would especially help Open Source.

But I doubt any of it has anything to do with HTML - Aaron, I think you need to find another mailing list ;o) But you have my best wishes.

-Chris "SoopahMan" Moschini
http://hiveminds.info/
http://soopahman.com/

Received on Friday, 14 November 2003 14:02:54 UTC