Colloquium at Stanford
The Unfinished Revolution


Memorandum

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 08:21:04 -0800

From:   Jack Park"
jackpark@verticalnet.com
Reply-To: unrev-II@onelist.com

To:     unrev-II@onelist.com
Subject:   DKR Prototype #1: Design Questions

With regard to using XML, here is a web site that offers source code for a Java browser that displays XML files using XLL and XSL. It is a project built for a Masters Thesis that is also available.

My experience with it says it has a few bugs that are easily fixed....

http://pages.wooster.edu/ludwigj/xml/index.html

Given this class of browser, it becomes possible to use an XML editor along the lines suggested earlier by Eric, and paint the ongoing document in a browser as a non-editable wyswyg display.

I am building such a tool as a literate programming front end for my program The Scholar's Companion(r). Editing special objects (e.g. concept maps, frames, etc) is done in separate dialogs and the resulting XML appended to the ongoing text display in the XML editor itself. Inserts, deletes, and so forth are handled in the dom tree to the left of the text display. Large issues appear to center, at least for me, on the blending of the literate programming code with the rest of the XML handlers.

A useful link for literate programming has been...

http://www.loria.fr/services/tex/english/litte.html

With regard to using dom, implementations to date have all been memory-resident, which poses a problem with enormous documents. I have not found an open-source implementation of a virtual dom system, though such an implementation does exist in a product.

Appropriate thought needs to be given to the issues that arise from the generation of documents that are not necessarily hierarchical in structure. RDF, and Groves might offer a more general representation scheme. There is some information on using RDF and XSL at...

http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~alison/mirador/xml/demo.html

A really useful Java project is the xml testbed at...

http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/08withall/

It is not strictly open source: you cannot use it in commercial products without permission, but it can be used and it includes perhaps the only implementation of Groves that I have found thus far.

Sincerely,

Jack

Jack Park