Xprez: A Declarative Presentation Language for XML

2003

XML and its associated technologies are increasingly being used in Electronic Publishing. This fact is due to some of its inherent characteristics: (1) XML allows separating the contents and the presentation format. (2) XML allows giving a logical structure to information. (3) XML allows associating semantics to the logical structure. There is a general agreement that these features will be very important for the development of the semantic web. In this context there is a demand for XML editors. A comparative analysis of current XML editors reveals that most of them have two general lacks. Firstly, using these editors requires deep knowledge of the XML syntax and its DTD or the XML-Schema particular vocabulary. Their interfaces do not guide to user in the edition process, e.g. by showing him/her the different possibilities available at any moment with respect to vocabulary. This drawback is especially discouraging for naïve users. Secondly, the validation of a document is made on request to specific commands or on saving it. In the worst case, these tools allow generating an invalid document that accumulates errors and overwhelms the user during their correction. In this paper, we describe an editor of XML documents, called eXitor, that shares the common features of the main XML editors, but tries to solve the two problems quoted above. With respect to the visibility of XML syntax, the editor supports both naïve and expert users. For the first kind of users, the user can understand the document structure without the need to see the XML source code. For the expert users, the tool allows displaying XML syntax. With respect to the validation problem, the user interface does not allow generating non-valid XML documents. During the edition process, elements and attributes can be inserted guaranteeing that the XML document is well-formed and valid with respect to a given DTD. (In the specific case of XML Schema this tool only supports DocBook XML Schema V4.1.2.3.) In summary, its main characteristics are: (1) The tool can hide syntactic information (XML syntax and DTD or Schema syntax), only displaying the textual contents of the elements. (2) The tool can display syntax information to the advanced user. (3) The document structure is always shown in a tree format. (4) The tool forces to introduce all the compulsory components. (5) At any moment, the document is well formed and valid.

2003

ABSTRACT The move towards a semantic web will produce an increasing number of presentations whose creation is based upon semantic queries. Intelligent presentation generation engines have already begun to appear, as have models and platforms for adaptive presentations. However, in many cases these models are constrained by the lack of expressiveness in current generation presentation and animation languages.

RuleML and SWRL are closely related rule markup languages that are growing in popularity particularly within the Semantic Web community. Both are based on XML and as such are more amenable to computer processing than human generation and interpretation. Even so it is possible to read and write RuleML and SWRL rules manually using a text editor. Due to certain constraints imposed within SWRL, however, reading and writing SWRL rules is significantly more difficult. This paper introduces an alternative XML-based presentation syntax, SWRLp, that lends itself more readily to the reading and writing of SWRL rules. SWRLp affords a simplification of the structural representation of rules by relying on a few basic conventions. A simple example of the improvement in readability of SWRLp rules is presented along with details about its design. XSLT transformation scripts that have been developed for translating to and from SWRLp and SWRL, RuleML, psuedo-Prolog and Jess are described.

Fundamenta Informaticae, 2016

We discuss three well-known languages for querying and manipulating XML documents: XQuery, XPath and XSLT. They are considered to be the standard languages for processing XML documents. However, specifying their complete semantics in a formal way seems almost impossible. Indeed, an attempt by the W3C XML Query Working Group to do so for XQuery was ultimately abandoned. We introduce three sublanguages, called MiXPath, MiXQuery and MiXSLT, and describe their syntax and formal semantics. The syntax and semantics of these languages are chosen such that they are consistent with the ones given in the related W3C recommendations. As such this provides a practical foundation for research and teaching of XML languages. For this purpose the sublanguages are chosen such that they contain the most crucial features, constructs and expressions of each of these three languages.

… of the 2001 ACM Symposium on …, 2001

The domain of XML transformations is becoming more and more important as a result of the increasing number of applications adopting XML as their format for data exchange or representation. Most of the existing solutions for expressing XML transformations are textual languages, such as XSLT or DOM combined with a general-purpose programming language. Several tools build on top of these languages, providing a graphical environment. Transformations are however still specified in a textual way using the underlying language (often XSLT), thus requiring the user to learn the associated textual language.

2020

The introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema Definitions (XSDs) represented a tremendous leap towards the design of domain-specific languages (DSLs) by enabling machine processibility of domain models conforming to formally described language grammar, i.e. capturing vocabulary and valid sentences. Consequently, it elevated the need for automating the creation and maintenance of dedicated and modern integrated development environments (IDEs) evading inherent XML limitations, such as rigid angle-bracket syntax, as well as enabling the support of valid domain model construction. Techniques and tools provided by model-driven engineering frameworks and language workbench frameworks offer elementary assistance during the initial implementation of a DSL. These frameworks, however, fail to automate DSL generation due to disparities exposed by the transformation and synthesis of XSDs, language grammars, and metamodels. Moreover, fundamental differences in the nature of languag...

2000

2001

This paper presents an overview of the Xylia software library, this library is being designed for the development of user friendly visual editors for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML)[1]. XML is a standard for markup languages. Each language conforming to XML is similar in structure to HTML, but has its own set of permissible tags, and rules about how they may relate. XML is designed to store structured data in a standardized, cross-platform, textual format. The Java programming language and the Swing toolkit from Sun Microsystems [2] are being used to build the library, which is suitable for application developers who wish to create simple, easy to use, robust editors for specific XML languages. Since both technologies are intended to promote cross-platform and cross-application interoperability, they are a good match for each other.

2007

We propose a new conceptual model for XML data called XSEM as a combination of several approaches in the area of the conceptual modeling for XML. The model divides the conceptual modeling process of XML data to two levels. On the first level, a designer designs an overall non-hierarchical conceptual schema of a domain. On the second level, he or she derives different hierarchical representations of parts of the overall conceptual schema using transformation operators. These hierarchical representations describe how ...

2019

XML as a markup language defines rules to encode data in a free format comprehensive by both human and machines. Usage of XML as a support for data integration, file configuration and interface definition is widely adopted and implemented by the software industry community. The purpose of this paper is to examine an implementation of XML as a programming language, extending the capabilities offered by frameworks and simplifying the coding tasks. The code becomes a set of functions sharing the same pattern all written as XML parts. The defined language takes advantage from the predefined common libraries and provides a mean to invoke handlers from user interface components. Programmers take benefits from the simplicity of this language to apprehend quickly the logic implemented by a function, which result in an increase in maintenance quality and rapid development stability.