http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=587803

mattr has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks, Slashdot just has a story up today, Tim Bray Says RELAX, about RELAX NG an originator of XML recommending the RELAX notation instead. He notes ATOM syndication format is based on RELAX.

However I couldn't find any perl tools on the software list or on cpan (except a parser in CORBA::XMLSchemas that makes RELAX files). There is a lot of RELAX in Java land though it seems.

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:

start = element book { page+ }
page = element page { text }

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..