[Laszlo-dev] Anyone know about XML DTD's?

[Henry Minsky]

That's certainly possible. Of course our compiler can't deal  at all
with invalid  XML, so you can't get this unless you have a well formed
file. But if you have the classes
declared, even as just skeletons or interfaces,  then this would be
the same mechanism as I'm thinking for generating the DTD, e.g.,
walking the in-core class model datastructure and serializing it as a
DTD.

I'm thinking of proposing a syntax for specify tag containment that
would extend our class declaration syntax something like this,

For example specifying that the <list> tag can contain only <listitem>
or subclasses thereof.


<class[or interface]  name="list">
   <containsElements restrict="true">
      <element>listitem</element>
   </containsElements>
   ...
</class>

A basic version of this syntax is used internally  in the new
schema/lfc.lzx file for declaring the base language and LFC tag
nesting rules.









On 10/12/07, David Temkin <temkin at laszlosystems.com> wrote:
> It would be incredibly useful to generate a DTD that includes user-
> defined classes for a given app on the fly.
>
> This is really a question for laszlo-user.
>
> On Oct 12, 2007, at 7:55 AM, Henry Minsky wrote:
>
> > We're in a position now to generate an XML DTD somewhat more easily
> > than
> > we used to be, because of recent changes to the compiler.  The
> > compiler has
> > a good in-core representation of the entire class hierarchy, and
> > some simple but
> > effective rules about tag containment (which classes of tags can be
> > children of which other tags).
> >
> > Does anyone here know enough about DTD's and real world editor tools
> > to know what
> > would be the most useful and compact format to generate a DTD in? The
> > one we used to generate was overly huge I think, and since we have a
> > better class-oriented representation of the containment rules now, I
> > am wondering if there is a small and simple DTD that
> > we can generate that would of most use to people who actually use
> > them. I personally
> > just use emacs NXML mode for editing, so I don't have any first-hand
> > knowledge of
> > what would be useful to people who actually rely on other
> > XML-DTD-aware editors.  If anyone has any examples of good DTD formats
> > for a similar XML-oriented programming language, I'd be interested in
> > seeing them.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Henry Minsky
> > Software Architect
> > hminsky at laszlosystems.com
>
>


-- 
Henry Minsky
Software Architect
hminsky at laszlosystems.com