Re: machine readable properties

Chris Lilley wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, 7:21:56 PM, Robin wrote:
> RB> In the meantime I wrote a brute force Perl screen scraper (ah, that good old 
> RB> '90s feel...) that finds regularities in the HTML of the spec to produce an XML 
> RB> dump of the properties. I haven't yet checked that it makes much sense beyond 
> RB> being WF. I've attached it in case anyone is interested (I can provide the 
> RB> script too). Further parsing of the value spaces as well as recognition of 
> RB> common options (yes, no, aural, N/A...) could be fairly easily added.
> 
> Excellent, we should have a similar file available from SVG specs.

SVG has some more complex things but is much more structured, it's certainly 
doable. Why does that sound like an action item? :)

> The
> only addition I could think of would be an xlink:href on the
> percentages element, pointing back to said prose if the content is
> 'see prose'.

It's not possible to point to the prose directly because it can't guess where it 
is, but I can add an xlink:href to the latest anchor, which should be close 
enough (and in fact useful for other purposes).

> Next step is to maintain the properties in that form and generate the
> (portion of the) html spec from that rather than the other way round.

Given a spec published using XML and XSLT, a little trivial document() trickery 
could easily replace <propdef ref='appearance'/> elements.

-- 
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
Research Engineer, Expway        http://expway.fr/
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE  8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488

Received on Wednesday, 19 March 2003 06:36:14 UTC