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Re: Stylesheets vs. DTDs or XML Schemas

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg61401] Re: [mg61387] Stylesheets vs. DTDs or XML Schemas
  • From: Chris Chiasson <chris.chiasson at gmail.com>
  • Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 02:44:46 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <200510170629.CAA16347@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Look up NotebookML, ExpressionML, etc

So, what do you intend to do with these theorems and proofs, etc? If
you only want to store information without worrying about style, you
could just assign it to a symbol (or even use the object oriented
extensions to Mathematica that I have seen floating around on one of
the WRI RSS feeds to which I subscribed).

One problem you may run into is that Mathematica's integrated style
and layout capabilities are not as good as CSS + XHTML. Heh, Publicon
can't even do a two column layout.

On 10/17/05, Steven T. Hatton <hattons at globalsymmetry.com> wrote:
> This question is really for people who understand what a DTD and XML Schema
> are.  For people who don't know what these are, very briefly, DTD and XML
> Schema are meta-languages used to create meta-documents which specify the
> logical structure of documents.  The DTD specification language is much
> older than XML Schema, and dates back to a time before there was a WWW.  It
> was used to specify markup languages used by publishers to organize the
> structure of their publications.  HTML is a bad example of such a markup
> language because it mixes formatting information with structural
> information.  It also has some other shortcomings, but some of these were
> inherited from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).  XML was
> created, in part, to recover the integrity of SGML, and also to streamline
> SGML so the resulting language would be easy to parse.
>
> DocBook is a good example of how these document specifications work.  It
> specifies such things as what can be directly nested within a chapter, and
> what must be "wrapped" in outer tags.  For example, you can't put a
> <listitem> directly in a <chapter> entity.  The <listitem> needs to be
> inside an entity that permits it, such as <itemizedlist>.
>
> I know the structure of a Mathematica notebook is very similar to XML, and I
> am confident that it Mathematica could be made to support DTDs or other
> documentation specification formats, but I don't believe it currently does
> support these in the sense of enforcing the validity of a DTD for a
> notebook.  IOW, I believe any style defined within a stylesheet can be used
> anywhere in the notebook.  Is this correct?
>
> What I want, for example, is the ability to create a "Theorem" cell that
> would have a subordinate cell which might be called "formalStatement", and
> another cell called "proof".  Likewise for lemas, etc.  These would not, of
> themselves, impose any kind of formatting on the content.  Such formatting
> would be accomplished using style specifications.  The rudementry
> components seem to be present in the current Mathematica stylesheet
> support, though these seem to be implemented by convention, rather than
> formality.
>
> Are there ways to design such composite cell structures so that I could
> simply create a "theorem" cell, and it would create whatever required child
> cells were defined for "theorem", and also provide me with a convenient
> means of determining what kinds of cells can be used in the immediate
> context?
> --
> "Philosophy is written in this grand book, The Universe. ... But the book
> cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language...
> in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, ...;
> without which wanders about in a dark labyrinth."   The Lion of Gaul
>
>


--
Chris Chiasson
http://chrischiasson.com/contact/chris_chiasson


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