[XML-SIG] ANN: SLiP and SLIDE - a quick XML shorthand syntax and tool for editing

[BudP.Bruegger]

Hi Uche:

Thanks for the interest.  Give me some time to work out some points better in
my mind and I'm also implementing s.th. that is close to releasing as first
minimal approach.  That way I can actually produce the examples with running
code.

I'm currently contemplating that the requirements are quite differnet for
"document style" applications with mixed content where whitespace (leading and
trailing etc.) matters and "data-style" applications where whitespace is
irrelevant.  I'm thinking of two modes in the shortand to take care of this..  
In data mode, one can then use a lot of indenting for clarity--in document mode
one has full control over whitespace...

Also, Karl's feedback made me realize (apart from an ugly formatting problem
that I have hopefully fixed now) that the main idea of my approach is that
apart from a base XML syntax, a shorthand needs to be extensible to accomodate
custom syntaxes (syntices??), for example for lists and tables, where the use
for tagging is rather cumbersome compared to Wiki style or structured text.
Other exmaples would be to include CVS files, customization files, or e-mail
messages that have well defined, parsable formats...

Will come up with some more soon.

best cheers
--bud

PS.  Have you looked at reStructuredText
(http://docutils.sourceforge.net/#restructuredtext) that seems a good
generalized Wiki-style text formatting approach.  They seem to create some
xml-like output from the current parser...

--b

On Thu, 05 Sep 2002 09:29:06 -0600
Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com> wrote:

> Your post sounds interesting, and apparently a lot of work has gone into your 
> ideas.  Some brief examples would be helpful as I'm trying to get a sense of 
> your ideas quickly.
> 
> I must note that I have recently started just using straight Wiki text in XML 
> content, and this works very well for me: I have an XSLT extension element for
> 
> 4Suite that takes such text and emits HTML to the processor output.  I plan to
> 
> post this soon to the Python Cookbook.
>