21 Apr 2001 fdrake   » (Master)

Well, well, well... I've been busy lately! I've spent a fair bit of time looking into some of the evolving W3C specifications, especially the XML DOM stuff. It's a little interesting seeing the directions the specs are being pulled in -- not sure of the motivations, sometimes!

My own DOM implementation is growing, but only slowly at this point -- I've worked on my Level 3 Loading module, and have at least a few test cases for non-default behaviors.

I spent a little time this evening working on my scripts for conversion of the LaTeX documentation for Python to XML -- perhaps that's not such a hopeless goal! I think I need to think further about the following topics:

  • The document schema: Specifically, function and method signatures need some attention.

  • Composition: If I go with smaller documents for module references, say one file per Python module, I'll want a composition mechanism that lets me put together a nicely interlinked web of references from a collection of module references and other text. It would be nice to keep a single collection of module references which could accomodate multiple top-level views.

  • Formatting for display: I've started playing with XSLT, and might be able to use that for a lot of the formatting, but I'm not sure yet. I need to learn a lot more about it to manage the hyperlinking between module references in a reasonable way.

  • Typesetting: Yes, I still think this is useful! Perhaps not for the library reference, but certainly for most of the other documents. Displays just aren't good enough for extended reading. I can probably use XSLT to generate LaTeX similar to the current markup, and then use a variant of my current document classes to make it look good.

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