XMLSpec - a bit of background

Hi Patrick,

XMLSpec is a tool created by Eve Maler (Sun Microsystem) and Norman  
Walsh (Sun Microsystem) to create W3C Specifications. It's an XML  
vocabulary which has a DTD, an XML Schema and a RNG Schema.

The tool is mainly maintained by Norman Walsh plus help of others on  
the spec-prod mailing-list.
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/

The most recent version of the schemas and XSL files are available at
	http://www.w3.org/2002/xmlspec/

I had a plan for a while to create a documentation for this tool, but  
I didn't have time/energy to do it.

[[[
W3C editors have developed several types of HTML and XML based  
grammars to make it easier to develop and maintain their  
specifications. We try to maintain a list of these grammars; XMLSpec  
is the most-often used incarnation of these grammars %u2014 Karl  
<karl@w3.org> plans to work on setting up a documentation for it, but  
you can see what e.g. Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core looks like  
in XMLSpec and read a few introductory materials: Richard Ishida's  
guide, the DI Working Group introduction to it (Member-only), Why Use  
XMLSpec? (Member-only).

Some raw results of a survey [Member-only] done among editors at the  
end of 2002 can help you in your choices.
]]]

-- W3C Editors' Home Page
http://www.w3.org/2003/Editors/
Wed, 08 Mar 2006 09:07:48 GMT

A start of a guide has been created by Richard Ishida, but this is  
more a guide for developing tools implementing XMLSpec than a user  
guide to edit W3C specifications with XMLSpec.
http://people.w3.org/rishida/misc/xmlspec-guide.html

There is also a short intro [Member Only]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-di-wg/2003Jun/att-0156/ 
WritingDIWGDocs.html

So basically there's a tool which has no guide for now, which is used  
by some WGs, but not all of them for different issues and reasons.

In the needs and projects around this tool.

* XMLSpec User Guide  [difficult]
	So people who are not used to this tool can start from scratch and  
edit a specification with it. Another trouble is that many people  
"hack" the vocabulary document making their own version.

* XHTML profile for XMLSpec [difficult]
	That would be practical for those who prefer to edit XHTML. Then an  
XSLT could convert from one version to the other. XML <-> XHTML. The  
main issue is how to stay in sync with the XML vocabulary. Are there  
ways to automatically generate the profile.



-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Tuesday, 11 April 2006 02:19:59 UTC