I would like to do some literate programming-type writing, probably
using the DocBook format. The paper by Norman Walsh entitled "Literate
Programming in XML" seems to be a good way to do that, using a couple
small namespace extensions (src:fragment and src:fragref). I could
write it in raw XML if need be, but I'd rather use s.t. like XMLMind.
However, while the freeware version of XMLMind does a fine job with text
(and probably lots of other things), it doesn't seem to know about
literate programming, and in particular it doesn't know about Walsh's
extensions for literate programming.
(But when I search for "src:fragment" etc. in the files in XMLMind's
config and docs directories, I get approximately a quarter bazillion
hits. So XMLMind uses literate programming somehow, although I'm not
sure I understand what these directories are for. I also see a couple
msgs in the archive of this mailing list about xsl support for Walsh's
extensions, so maybe I'm missing something.)
So, my questions:
Is it possible to tell XMLMind (either the freeware version or the pay
version) about Walsh's literate programming extensions? The 'Help' says
that the dlg box to add a namespace is "not displayable for
non-namespace aware documents", and that "XXE [= XMLMind XML Editor] is
not namespace aware for a document using a DTD as its grammar." Does
this matter, so long as their is not a namespace collision?
I tried inserting the xmlns:src attribute into the <article> tag, as per
Walsh's article. But this gives an error 'element has no attribute
"xmlns:src"'. I presume this is because XMLMind (and DTDS in general?)
is not namespace aware. If so, just how are you supposed to add an
extension like Walsh's?
If I had a schema for DocBook, rather than a DTD, would it be "namespace
aware"? (IIUC, I would need the non-free version of XMLMind to use
schemas.)
Other ideas welcome... what I think would help most is a _small_ but
_complete_ sample showing 'fragment' and 'fragref' embedded into a
DocBook doc, which will load into XMLMind and validate. That's what I
thought the sample code in Walsh's paper was, but it doesn't seem to be
stand-alone (and of course the URLs and such like are old).
--
Mike Maxwell
Linguistic Data Consortium
