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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Proposal for BNF/EBNF markup
At 4:06 PM -0500 3/19/00, Eve L. Maler wrote: >This message contains a proposal for BNF/EBNF markup... At 6:35 AM -0500 3/22/00, Norman Walsh wrote: >It looks like a good start to me. Other users who have expressed an >interest in BNF, please speak up now! :-) Looks pretty impressive to me. Other than Norman's feedback, which comes from a great deal more experience than mine (understatement), I have a couple of comments. (1) It seems to me that the element names are a little cryptic, especially if they're going to find their way into the DocBook lexicon, appearing alongside other elements not related to BNF/EBNF. One of the things I like about DocBook is that I can usually do a quick browse of the element reference and find what I'm looking for by a couple of quick intuitive guesses. (There are exceptions, but I guess the intention is to avoid making this one of them.) What would you think about making the element names a little more self-explanatory, at the risk of making them too verbose. For example: prod --> production lhs --> prodleftside rhs --> prodtranslation (or maybe translation, translations, or translationlist) nt --> nonterminal rhsline --> prodtranslationitem (or maybe translationitem) (2) I've seen repetition expressed using * and +, and I've also seen it expressed using curly brackets. What would you think if this were expressed semantically in the XML with something like either a <bnfrepetition> element (which begs the question, how to distinguish between * and +), or perhaps a <zeroormore> and a <oneormore> element. (Note: I'm not thrilled with my element names here; I'm more interested in bringing up the idea to encourage feedback.) -- +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dave Makower <davemak@iclick.com> | | Manager of Portal Architecture & Development | +--------------------------------+----------------------------------+ | iClick, Inc. | (914) 872-8030 | | 120 Bloomingdale Road | (914) 872-8100 fax | | 3rd Floor | (914) 872-8000 main | | White Plains, NY 10605 | http://www.iclick.com/ | +--------------------------------+----------------------------------+
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