Request for review: DTD/XSDs for the Confluence Atlassian 4 storage form

["Graham Hannington" <graham_hannington@fundi.com.au>]

From my earlier email:

> [I am] hoping to learn more. And I am prepared to publicly expose my 
ignorance to do so

On that note...

I am a user of Atlassian Confluence, a commercial wiki product. I have no 
other affiliation with Atlassian, (Okay, I'm Australian, too.)

Previous (3.x) versions of Confluence stored content in a wiki markup 
format. The current version of Confluence (4) stores content in a 
proprietary XML vocabulary that consists of:

- Elements and attributes that have the same names as a subset of elements 
and attributes in XHTML 1.0 (mostly from XHTML 1.0 Strict, with a few 
additional elements from XHTML 1.0 Transitional). Elements in the 
Confluence XML vocabulary that have the same name as elements in XHTML 1.0 
have a much more limited set of attributes than the XHTML 1.0 elements of 
the same name.

- Proprietary elements and attributes

Some Confluence users have asked Atlassian to provide a schema (DTD, XSD, 
or both) for this XML vocabulary. However, Atlassian has indicated that 
providing a DTD/XSD is not high on its list of current priorities.

So, I have attempted to create the DTD/XSDs myself, based on a combination 
of:

- The XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD (and a few snippets of Transitional)
- The documentation that Atlassian has provided (which falls far short of 
the detail required to develop a DTD/XSD)

- Experimentation with the Confluence rich text editor (to exercise the 
full range of markup that the editor can generate)

- "Forensic analysis" of the XML source of Atlassian's own Confluence 
documentation (Atlassian publishes "exports" of their public 
documentation, containing the XML source of over 4000 pages; so, a 
reasonable-size test bucket) - xmllint was very useful here for automating 
validation, and iteratively refining the constraints of the XSD/DTDs

I hope I'm not breaking any mailing list guidelines here (I don't think 
so; I've just re-read them)...

I welcome feedback (constructive criticism) of these DTD/XSDs.

I'm not offering any money, so feel free to have fun at my expense by 
flaming these files, and my questionable XML skills, to a cinder. Perhaps 
a phoenix will rise from the ashes ;-).

You can download the package (a 30 KB .zip file) from:

http://www.amnet.net.au/~ghannington/confluence/confluence-schema.zip

For details, see the readme.html in the .zip.

I am aware that the tips in the readme on "Using a catalog, rather than 
explicitly referring to the DTD/XSD in each document instance" are, at 
best, incomplete... I'll fix this in the next couple of days, with thanks 
to Liam for his recent advice (on this mailing list).

I hope that the above address will be a temporary home for this package; I 
hope that Atlassian will soon either render the package obsolete by 
providing their own - although I think that's unlikely, given its stated 
priorities - or take ownership of this package.

Graham Hannington
Perth, Western Australia

Fundi Software Pty Ltd  2011  ABN 89 009 120 290


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