[om] DSDs

[Michael Kohlhase]

Dear Friends,

I have found the following on the net, it might be interesting to the
OpenMath community.

Enjoy,

     Michael

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   Priv. Doz. Dr. Michael Kohlhase, FB Informatik,  Bau 36, Zi. 220.1
   Universit"at des Saarlandes, 66041 Saarbr"ucken, Germany    
   tel/fax: (49)-681-302-4628/2235 net: <kohlhase at cs.uni-sb.de> 
   http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~kohlhase/
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Nils Klarlund <klarlund at research.att.com> writes:

> Document Structure Descriptions are a new way of describing classes of
> XML documents (http://www.brics.dk/DSD).  The notation was
> specifically designed with XSLT in mind (among other things of
> course):
>  
>    Whenever you write code to typeset a class of XML documents
>    described with a weak descriptive notation such as DTDs (or even
>    XML Schemas as they look currently), you are faced with the "gap"
>    problem: many documents that satisfy the DTD are not really valid
>    documents anyway, and thus they slip through the crack (the DTD
>    validation) and the XSLT must now be written so as to inform the
>    user about the syntactic problems.  Examples abound: nested anchors
>    in HTML, no simultaneous "href" and "name" attribute, etc.
>   
> Instead, we propose a strong descriptive notation whose expressive
> power is similar to XSLT.  Thus, syntax description (in DSDs) can be
> separated from semantics (in XSLT).
> 
> Our announcement is:
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> A Document Structure Description (DSD) is a new and very effective way
> of describing XML documents.  This new schema language is result of a
> research collaboration between AT&T Labs, NJ and BRICS at the
> University of Aarhus, Denmark.  The DSD language has arisen out of a
> need to describe XML documents to Web programmers with an elementary
> background in computer science.  DSDs have also been expressively
> designed to further W3C sponsored XML technologies such as Cascading
> Style Sheets (CSS) and XSL Transformations (XSLT).
> 
> CSS is an essential part of modern HTML, but has so far not been
> formulated as a general style sheet mechanism for XML that works with
> any semantic domain.  DSDs provide both a generalized semantics for a
> CSS-like style sheet mechanism and document processing instructions
> that provide the abstraction benefits of CSS in any XML document.
> 
> XSLT 1.0 is a programming notation that allows transformations of
> classes of XML documents into semantic domains like HTML.  XSLT
> programs are easy to write, especially if assumptions can be made
> about the input documents.  The expressive power of DSDs allow
> declarative and readable specifications of XML documents that are to
> be subjected to XSLT processing.
> 
> DSDs require no specialized XML/SGML insights.  The technology is
> based on general and familiar concepts that allow much stronger
> document descriptions than possible with DTDs or the current XML
> Schema proposal.  
> 
> For more information, please go to the DSD Web site:
> 
>   http://www.brics.dk/DSD
> 
> We already offer
> 
> - a detailed, complete, and tested DSD 1.0 language description
> 
> - an introductory article
> 
> - free source code
> 
> - a meta-DSD that completely accounts for the syntax of DSDs
> 
> - an XSLT pretty-printer that converts DSDs into hyper-link HTML
> 
> - a preliminary industrial case report, where we discuss the use of
>   DSD to describe XPML, a variation on HTML for interactive voice
>   services
> 
> 
> We are encouraging comments and suggestions for further development!
> 
> 
> Nils Klarlund, AT&T Research
> Anders Møller, BRICS
> Michael I. Schwartzbach, BRICS
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
> 
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