Re: [xml-dev] Which latest and greatest XML Standards Should I UseFor XM

[Shlomi Fish <shlomif@shlomifish.org>]

Hi Liam,

On Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:28:01 -0500
Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2012-11-13 at 20:45 +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I have defined an XML grammar titled XML-Grammar-Fortune (see
> > http://web-cpan.shlomifish.org/modules/XML-Grammar-Fortune/ ), which I use
> > to mark up UNIX-like fortune cookies and quotations (see
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/ for examples and resultant XHTML
> > and plain text outputs), and which is based on XML.
> > 
> > Now, I have considered modernising the grammar somewhat and possibly
> > incorporate the following elements:
> > 
> > 1. Using xml:id instead of a plain "id=""" attribute as well as xml:lang and
> > other xml: standard attributes.
> 
> The advantage of xml:id is questionable here; it's most likely to be
> useful if documents in other formats point into your documents.
> 

Well, they can, like in this:

http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/shlomif.html#hi-sophie

So far I used plain id="..." attribute.

> xml:lang, on the other hand, is a definite win.

OK.

> 
> xml:base can be used for resolving relative application-layer links, but
> it seems unlikely you'll need that here.
> 

I see.

> > 2. Making a judicious use of XML namespaces.
> 
> Unless people will be mixing your format with others, or you want to
> include other formats in yours, namespaces will only complicate life for
> no great benefit. XPath expressions will no longer match unless you
> prefix every name, for example. It's a trade-off, though.
> 

Ah.

> >  Right now the <screenplay>-typed
> > tags were done in a hackish way by copy-pasting the RELAX NGs and XSLTs
> > contents
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/XML-Grammar/Fiction/ , but
> > they may be better doable using namespaces. One thing that worries me is
> > whether I'll need to do sometihng like xmlns="[LONG URL HERE]" everytime I
> > want to use them.
> 
> Yes.
> 

I see.

> > 3. I have defined well-formed plaintext grammars for XML-Grammar-Fiction and
> > XML-Grammar-Screenplay (see the above link), which gets translated to the
> > custom XML grammars (and from there to other XMLs using XSLT), and I wonder
> > whether I can do the same for XML-Grammar-Fortune. Is there a good tool for
> > doing something like that with ease?
> 
> I believe there's a parser generator that reads EBNF but don't know if
> it can spit out XSD.
> 

OK.

> > 4. Should I use XSLT 2.0 and/or XPath 2.0? Right now I prefer to use Perl 5
> > with the XML::LibXSLT CPAN module that is in turn based on libxslt from the
> > GNOME project, and from what I know, the only full open-source XSLT 2.0
> > implementation is Saxon, which is written in Java.
> 
> I prefer to use XQuery from Perl, e.g. with the BaseX API, and can help
> you with that if you like. There is also dbxml, but since Oracle
> swallowed up Sleepycat I don't know if it's maintained actively.
> 

Well, for what it's worth, I don't see how XQuery will help me here, and I'd
prefer to stick with XSLT (even XSLT 1.0).

> I don't know of an open source XSLT 2 processor that's easily used on
> Linux from Perl. Saxon is the nearest, and you can get reasonable
> performance if you run it with nailgun, which keeps a spare JVM started
> all the time to avoid the startup cost, but it will still run in a
> separate process. A few people have tried moving libxml towards XSLT 2,
> but have not collaborated with each other, and in any case it'd probably
> be better to start with getting XSLT 2 (and 3) into webkit.

OK. I wasn't aware there was XSLT 3 already.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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