Invisible XML specification published

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