Forum OpenACS Development: Beta Emacs OACS module available

Would it require much work to get rid of psgml-mode and move it on to nxml-mode http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=2061?

nxml does real-time syntax and error highlighting.  Compared to psgml, it's like writing xml in broad daylight vs using a candle.  Maybe you can get psgml to do much of the same but I got more functionality out of nxml in 2 days than out of psgml in 2 years.

No, I haven't tried to get that working yet.  Actually I haven't really gotten very far with oacs.el - I got it installed and not causing errors, and sometimes it surprises me by pre-populating new files, but I don't really know what it can do.  I suppose I'll have to walk through Bart's notes and turn them into documentation.

Bart,

It's a bit tough to give much in terms of pros and contras od nXML vs. PSGML -- when editing large documents I do prefer the former, but largely due to periffery, e.g. Norman Walsh's unichars/xmlunicode that allows to just type EM dash, instead of putting in —.  I don't suppose on-the-fly parsing and validation is very critical for XQLs.

On the flip side, named entities are not supported in nXML the same way as you may be used to with PSGML, i.e. if you declare ENTITY OACS somewhere in the topmost file of your DocBook project (cross referenced in PSGML way via parent-doc), nXML won't understand it, and hence will claim your doc to be invalid.

It will probably be a bit tough, and may in fact require some rework in Templating and possibly other core parts of OpenACS to make ADPs into a valid XML.  In particular, I am not sure how to make @vars@ accpetible as attributes in <if> tags -- I don't think XML allows '@' in the name of an attribute.

The reason for my question was more related to a (selfish) fact that I've ripped PSGML out from my .emacs 3-4 months ago, and am not very much inclined putting it back...  I'll have a look at xhtml.rnc of nXML to see if it can be hammered into validating ADPs.

Lastly, I think that James Clark has a tool that does DTD->RNG transform, hence having valid ADP and XQL DTD, it may be fairly trivial to create a basic RNG schema...  Yeah, here: http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang.html

I don't think it would require a rework as such -- what I am saying is that ADPs are not valid XML files, that is all.  There might be a way (or there may be none) to shut off nXML's validation of @@'s.  If there is no way -- well, so be it.

The only benefit I see, is that if your template validates, then there is a greater chance that generated page would validate as well.  Otherwise -- see my old post (https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=118033) about how compliant OACS is (was? will check) with even basic requirements (like quoting of attribute values and absence of open-ended tags).

One really big advantage to moving to .adp's that validate as xml is that there are a number of bugs that are not diagnosed very well when the adp is malformed (eg an unclosed multiple tag produces a not very intuitive error). Having the adp's validate would make automated testing for that sort of error straightforward.

On the other hand, dreamweaver will work just fine even if they are not well formed xml (although maybe this has changed since version 4 which was the last time I worked with designers who used it).

I think it would be pretty straightforward to fix the most common things (singleton tags, attribute quoting, and case would be most of it), but <if> tags and the nesting of adp tags inside html tags (like on the body tag in the master template) would be problematic.

quoting everything and fixing case can be done w/o discussion, but we would have to have a TIP for the other required changes and while I would vote yes for such a change I am not sure other people would.

oops, too fast. :))

Missed one more para: I have checked the above .rnc and it works perfectly, inclusing completions (not that there are many, but still...).

Bart,

This is cool, thanks.  I guess, since ADP has never been (and could probably never be) a subset of XML -- it's ok if it stays unvalidatable (gee, I just love new Konqueror's on-the-fly spell checking -- as expected there's no such word as the one immediately before the bracket 😊 )...

Bart,

tla get returns 404 error:

% tla get -A mailto:bart-arch@thecodemill.biz--2004 oacs--devo--1.0 oacs
webdav error: 404 Not Found

Bart,

Step-by-step:

% tla register-archive bart-arch@thecodemill.biz--2004 http://www.thecodemill.biz/repository/{archives}/2004/
% tla get -A bart-arch@thecodemill.biz--2004 oacs--devo--1.0 oacs
webdav error: 404 Not Found

The same happens on 2 machines: a FreeBSD and a Mac OS X.

• lynx:

                                                                                        Not Found 
                                                                                                                                        
  Not Found                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
     The requested URL was not found on this server.                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                        
                               AOLserver/4.1.0 on http://www.thecodemill.biz       
  

• Mac OS X Finder (that can mount WebDAV shares): server cannot be found on the network
• Safari: shows empty dir
• cadaver:

  > cadaver http://www.thecodemill.biz/repository/{archives}/2004/
  Could not contact server:
  404 Not Found
  dav:!>
  

I just tried with cadaver and it worked fine for me...

cadaver http://www.thecodemill.biz/repository/{archives}/2004/
dav:/repository/{archives}/2004/> ls
Listing collection `/repository/{archives}/2004/': succeeded.
Coll:   =meta-info                           128  Feb 10 04:17
Coll:   bin                                   80  Mar  3 19:48
Coll:   cache-control                         88  Mar  9 01:55
Coll:   oacs                                  80  Feb 10 04:18
Coll:   pound                                144  Feb 13 18:54
dav:/repository/{archives}/2004/>
Connection to `www.thecodemill.biz' closed.

I've edited .arch-params/=locations/bart-arch@thecodemil.biz--2004 to add braces and all was well.  For some reason braces got stripped.  Will see whether this is tcsh's fault or else...

Just thinking out loud a little further -- XSL is a valid XML and they do include conditionals...

But this is probably too much of a deviation from the topic of this thread.

The curly braces are a problem, and there's no need for them in archive locations.  The only place curly braces are still mandatory are the in-tree {arch} directories.

The reason they still show up places, is the tutorial uses them in its example of how to set up tla archives.  I believe the tutorial will soon be changed to discourage this unecessary use of {}.