[SCL] XCL 1.0 Spec update (with DTD)

[Murray Altheim]

Peeples,

I've just finished updating the XCL 1.0 spec. There's not a lot
of changes to the text since the last version, though the new
abstract syntax spec is now in the references, I added Chris's
name to the Acknowledgements, and fixed up a few of the examples.

Version 1.8 of the document can be found at:

    http://purl.org/xcl/1.0/

All previous versions are now available as links found at the
bottom of the document.

More importantly, the XCL 1.0 DTD is now functional. There's a
zip distribution of files available from Appendix C that includes
the DTD, a test file, some miscellaneous XML files necessary if
you want to validate it using James Clark's nsgmls (if you just
want to use it with a Java or perl-based XML parser you won't
need this). There are also two directories full of auto-generated
HTML files so you can view the document model of Level 1 and
Level 2 (the latter includes the ref elements, other than that
they're basically the same). The test document validates, but it
would be good at some point looking at what's allowed in where
(e.g., what should be the content model for <type>? etc.) and
start considering a bit larger test suite. But all those things
can come later.

This is all provisional work but I'm hoping it will all collide
in the end productively. It's (I believe) a good exercise in
seeing how various issues might shake out, esp. the PSIs and
other webbie things.

I'd be very interested to see how an RDF-based syntax might
compare to this one. It's not something I plan to do, but I
think *how* each concrete syntax hooks into the abstract might
suggest how tools could be developed to convert between different
concrete syntaxes (using XSLT stylesheets, for example). Other
rocket science like that...

As always, comments, praise, beer, criticism, hate mail, gin, etc.
perfectly welcome.

Murray

PS. Off to bed for me now.
......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

   [...T]here will be a simulated biological attack on Chicago, with
   thousands of patients showing symptoms of serious illnesses
   beginning to appear in the city's hospitals on Tuesday. [...] The
   exercise is planned to end on a positive note, with suspects being
   arrested at the end of the week.
             -- "US drills for terror attacks", BBC News, 12 May 2003

   The terrorist attack is taken for granted, but endlessly postponed.
   The true catastrophe is that we are living under a permenent threat
   of catastrophe. -- Slavoj Zizek, The New Yorker, 5 May 2003 [38-47]