[ANNOUNCE] New MicroXML draft available

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

The 2011-06-30 draft of MicroXML is now available at
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/MicroXML.html . There are two substantive
changes in this draft and a whole lot of editorial ones, including
conversion from plain text to HTML.  (The draft is now a MicroXML
document as well.)

The first substantive change is that a subset of XML processing
instructions are now part of MicroXML.  PIs are not in the data model,
but processors SHOULD pass them to applications anyhow.  A MicroXML PI
MUST look like a start-tag, except for beginning "<?" and ending "?>",
so PIs similar to xml-style work, but random PIs like "<?foo bar?>" do
not.

The second change is the provision of a JSON representation of the
MicroXML data model using the JsonML convention.  In this convention,
an element object is represented as a JSON array whose first element is
the name, second element is a JSON object representing the array map,
and remaining elements are the children (either strings or JSON arrays).
This roundtrips the data model and MicroXML documents (without PIs or
comments) through JSON, but is not suitable for roundtripping JSON
through MicroXML; for that purpose the JSONX convention is RECOMMENDED.

I'll have a new release of MicroLark, the first MicroXML parser, soon.
This will support PIs as a standard feature and will provide many useful
iterators over the Element tree.

-- 
The man that wanders far                        cowan@ccil.org
from the walking tree                           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --first line of a non-existent poem by:         John Cowan