- From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>
- Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:43:44 -0600
- To: xmlschema-dev@w3.org
During his talk at XML Prague this morning, Steven Pemberton announced that the Invisible XML 1.0 spec has been published. (Or so I believe -- I confess I was asleep at the time.) Invisible XML (often ixml for short) is a method for treating non-XML documents as if they were XML, enabling authors to write documents and data in a format they prefer while providing XML for processes that are more effective with XML content. The basic method is simple: if the non-XML notation of a file or data stream can be described by a context-free grammar, an ixml processor can read the appropriate grammar and use it to parse the non-XML data stream, returning an XML document representing the parse tree for the input. Multiple implementations of ixml exist, in a variety of languages (ABC, Java, Javascript, XQuery; an XSLT implementation is in development). Links to the spec, to tutorials, and to other supporting material (schemas, sample grammars, related tools, test suite) are available at https://invisibleXML.org Readers of xmlschema-dev may be interested to observe that it is relatively straightforward, given an IXML grammar, to generate a schema for the XML representation of input recognized by the grammar, which enforces at least some of the constraints. (Constraints on values and on mixed content expressed in an ixml grammar may or may not be easily expressible in any given schema language for XML documents. But at least some of the constraints can be expressed.) Anyone interested in making it easier to apply the XML technology stack to non-XML data is encouraged to check out invisible XML. -- C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Black Mesa Technologies LLC http://blackmesatech.com
Received on Friday, 10 June 2022 14:44:05 UTC