[wiki-standards] Fwd: Speaking of Creole...

[Dirk Riehle]

Not strictly relevant, but funny coincidence... --Dirk

---------------------------------------------------------
Creole: Validating Overlapping Markup
Jeni Tennison, XTech 2007 Paper Abstract

XML assumes that documents can be represented by a single hierarchy
of elements, each nesting neatly inside its parent. However, in the
real world, documents are more complicated, and often contain
overlapping structures: in a book, pages overlap with sections; in a
play, speeches overlap with lines; in a collaborative document,
comments overlap with each other. There are many ways in which such
documents can be represented, from using empty elements or processing
instructions as milestones in XML, to inventing a new syntax such as
LMNL syntax. Whichever approach is chosen, the next problem is how to
check that the document is valid. This XTech 2007 paper will present
Creole (Composable Regular Expressions for Overlapping Languages etc.).
Creole is an extension to RELAX NG, and follows its philosophy of
defining a pattern that matches a valid document. Other schema
languages for overlapping markup, such as SGML's CONCUR and Rabbit
and Duck Grammars, consider a single document as multiple documents,
each of which is validated separately. Creole treats the document as
a whole, and markup languages that use overlap as separate languages
in their own right. As the paper will show, Creole, like RELAX NG,
is readily implementable using Brzozowski derivatives: considering
a document as a stream of events, the derivative of a pattern with
respect to an event is a new pattern that should match the remaining
events. Since every syntax for overlap can be mapped onto a stream
of events, Creole can be applied whatever representation is used.
This paper will detail the syntax of Creole and the algorithm for its
implementation, as well as providing examples of Creole schemas and
describing its XSLT 2.0 implementation.

http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/77
See also the Creole Wiki: http://www.lmnlwiki.org/index.php/Creole

----------------------------------------------------------------------