SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is well established in electronic publishingindustry. The number of users and the number of applications grows everyday.If we look at the market the choice of available tools is very wide. We have tools forevery purpose and for each price.However, from a technical point of view there are still some open areas for research andimprovement. In this work we will address the parsing technology. Can we improve it? Or,is there another way to do it? Can we achieve better results? These are some of thequestions that we will try to answer along this paper.SGML parsers are normally implemented using traditional technology: syntax directedtranslation. In the SGML context these parsers are good and offer a good performance. Theproblems emerge when we want to do something else besides structural validation. Forexample, to build an extension to perform semantic checking or to have on-line validationinstead of batch validation.The focus of this paper will be a DTD (Document Type Definition) editor that generatesspecific editors for each specific type of document. To implement this editor we developan AG (Attribute Grammar) for SGML syntax. But the most important part it is not thisgrammar. The editor has a built-in generator that at any moment translates the DTD beingedited to a generic AG.In this paper we will discuss the methodology used to develop this DTD editor and we willmake a detailed presentation of the conversion performed between DTDs and AttributeGrammars. At the end we will show a glimpse of the intended environment that along withthis editor includes a style editor and a semantics editor.
展开▼
