From server@amber.ora.com Wed Jan 22 02:23:03 1997 Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 12:27:09 -0500 From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM.UIC.EDU> Subject: Re: preserving returns in DocBook document, editing with PSGML On Mon, 20 Jan 1997 19:17:32 -0500 Eve L. Maler said: >>I think this discussion no longer relates to Docbook. However, I find >>it interesting as there is no standard means of associated arbitrary >>data with a DTD. It would be nice that descriptive data for a DTD >>can be utilized by different SGML software packages without changing >>the data. For example, if an editor allowed me to define a description >>for an element (that I can popup at any time), I cannot utilize those >>descriptions in another editor (that has a similiar feature) since it >>will use a different format/convention for defining descriptions. > >I know of a DTD that's explicitly meant for documenting DTDs, but it's not >publicly available. However, the idea of associating various descriptive >tidbits with markup models seems to be ripe, as it keeps coming up >frequently these days. As far as I can make out, there are several such DTDs. Most are either proprietary or not well publicized: as far as I can tell, almost every organization that does DTD development for clients has a standard pattern for documenting the element types and their attributes, though they may not always have a DTD since many customers appear to want the documentation in, er, a word processor format. There is, however, one DTD for DTD documentation that's reasonably well documented and publicly available: the TEI 'Tag Set Documentation' (TSD) DTD, documented in chapter 27 of the TEI Guidelines. There are also several DTDs for DTDs themselves: Omnimark apparently has one, perhaps internal to the product, for handling DTDs as documents, Wayne Wohler did one for CApH a while back, I did one for a DTD pre-processor called dpp, and, most publicly, Tim Bray did one as a proposal for replacing 8879's DTD syntax with document-instance syntax in XML. ------------------
Notes: in the form of links, added by RCC (January 24, 1997, revised June 22, 1997)
------------------- [Michael again:] The biggest problem I know in this connection is that none of the DTDs of the first group (for documenting markup schemes) connect with any of the DTDs of the second group (for representing the logical structure of markup declarations). If anyone knows of other DTDs in either of these classes, please let me know as I'm interested in keeping an approximately current list. But as has already been pointed out, this is probably off topic; my apologies. Michael Sperberg-McQueen