Re: [xml-dev] Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/pr

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> For the QT4 specifications, the schema is here:
> 
>  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qt4cg/qtspecs/master/schema/xsl-query.dtd
> 
> But it seems unlikely that you didn’t know that, so I probably don’t
> understand the question.
> 

That of course is the general-purpose schema for the narrative text in the specifications. There are several more specialised schemas: the schema for the EBNF grammar files, which is at specifications/grammar-40/grammar.dtd, the schema for function specifications which is at specifications/xpath-functions-40/src/fos.xsd, and the vocabulary for the XSLT element syntax summary which as far as I can see does not have a formal DTD or XSD definition.

The narrative text could have been written using any vocabulary suitable for technical documentation, with strong support for intra- and inter-document cross references, and terminology definitions, though it does have some more specialized elements corresponding to the W3C conventions for front matter and for linking to EBNF grammar.

The more specialized vocabularies have been used by tools that do things like test data generation, test coverage analysis, automated parser generation, generation of skeletal vendor documentation and third-party training material, streamability analysis, and probably many other things I'm not aware of. They provide much more than markup for rendering human-readable specification documents.

Michael Kay
Saxonica