perlquestion
mattr
Dear Monks,
Slashdot just has a story up today, [http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/05/0025208|Tim Bray Says RELAX], about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELAX_NG|RELAX NG] an originator of XML [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/11/27/Choose-Relax|recommending] the RELAX notation instead. He notes ATOM syndication format is based on RELAX.
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However I couldn't find any perl tools on the [http://relaxng.org|software list] or on cpan (except a [http://search.cpan.org/~perrad/CORBA-XMLSchemas-0.41/idl2rng.pl|parser] in CORBA::XMLSchemas that makes RELAX files). There is a lot of RELAX in Java land though it seems.
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Is there anything out there? I hate editing XML and always thought a natural language style notation would be much better. That wish is approximated by RELAX NG's "flattened schema" like this example from Wikipedia:
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start = element book { page+ }
<BR>page = element page { text }
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My only other question is whether this notation could be extended (if it doesn't allow it already) to include not just a schema but the data inside it. My guess is it would then look a bit like a data structure serialized into perl..