Re: [FleXML-Users] What about a foreach tag?

[William F. D. <wil...@th...>]

On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 09:51 +0200, Martin Quinson wrote:
> Hello William,
> 
> What I have in mind is a sort of meta-tag, not needing to be
> specifyied in the DTD. Maybe a better way to express what I meant is
> to use this kind of notation:
> [FOREACH[A][list of elements][text to dupplicate]]
> just the same way we have [CDADAT[text to protect]]
> or we had the if construct in SGML (can't remember the syntax right
> now). But that's so awful, that's incredible.

<![CDATA[text to protect]]> is an XML construct described in the
standard: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/

I'd like to keep flexml as close as possible to the standard (I know
there are a few things we miss, but I'd rather move torward the
standard, not away from it.


> Or, you're right, maybe the solution is to do a new generator in the
> spirit of fleXML, but dedicated to xsl transformations. After all,
> these tags for kinda interpreting the XML are all part of the XSLT
> standard. They are a bit verbose in my taste, but that's the way every
> body does this out there. The name wouldn't even be hard to find:
> fleXSLT ;)

I like it (the name "fleXSLT", and the distinction between fleXML and
fleXSLT).  I am really conflicted about XSLT -- the idea is so good and
the syntax is so shitty!  I think "verbose" is the kindest thing you
could say about it.  So doing something in the spirit of xslt, but a
saner syntax, seems like a great idea.

> And once it's done, having a bit of xslt embeeded within the xml
> should be doable, I guess.

OK.

> But before that, I'm more concerned about the missing rules. I know
> better understand what you said to me about 2 years ago. The parsers
> never jam nowadays, but the default rule is not very appropriate. 

Correct.  It's a little embarrassing that we don't get better messages
out.  I'm glad you're looking into it.

> My last change set in the code was to have an elegant error message
> when a starting tag was misplaced. Previous one was somehting like
> "char '<' found when expecting </mytag>". Now, it's "Starting tag
> <something> not allowed here". That's a bit better, but I'd like to
> have both of the information ("Starting tag <something> found when
> expecting </mytag>"). For this I'll have to explicit much more
> transitions in the lex file.

I'm not sure I understand.  Could you please elaborate?

>  Now, I do one rule for all states where
> the tag is not allowed (check lines flexml.pl:1382-1397). But where
> the hell can I find what each state wants to get further? Those damn
> data structures are not friendly...

Man, I need some time to look into this.

> Another change direction I'd like to follow is the possible use of
> schema instead of DTD as input. Shouldn't be hard, and not intrusive
> either (only parsechildren needs to be changed). Just need some more
> time ;)

Schemas -- that's another area where I'm out of sync with the popular
view.  Everybody is moving to schemas (so you are right, supporting then
in flexml is a great idea) but personally I think they are so ugly and
avoid them when I can.

-- 
William F Dowling
wil...@th...
www.scientific.thomson.com