Re: [Texmacs-dev] XML

[Felix Breuer]

On Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:27:47 +0200
Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden> wrote:

> Recall that we still should replace entities &char; by markup
> <tmsym>char</tmsym> or <tmsym name="char"> in the TMML format too.

The drawback of <tmsym name="char"/> is that this cannot be easily
transformed via XSL. Nonetheless we need to get rid of the &char; entity
names, because the XML standard only defines &lt; &gt; &quot; and &amp;
There are standartized names for many unicode characters, but these have
to be declared inside an XML document for it to be well-formed.

One possibility would be to produce correct character codes (e.g. &#ABCD;)
This would yield TMML documents that are well-formed XML, and could this
be easily transformed into other formats via XSL. True, this is not as
readable.

An alternative would be to write a proper TMML DTD where all needed
entity names are declared. Then we could write &char; and the doc would
be well-formed. Another advantage would be, that we could treat TeXmacs
symbols that _are_ in unicode and those that _are not_ identically: In
the DTD we could declare (pseudo-syntax):

  &somecharinunicode;    -> &#AB34;
  &somecharnotinunicode; -> <tmsym name="somechar"/>

>From within TeXmacs we would always generate entity names.

I could try to implement such a DTD, but it will take quite some time
till I get to it. No, I have not forgotten about the literate programming
plugin :)


Regards,
Felix