[XML-SIG] ANN: SLiP and SLIDE - a quick XML shorthand syntax and tool for editing

Thomas B. Passin tpassin@comcast.net
Wed, 03 Apr 2002 23:42:57 -0500


[Scott Sweeney]

> Announcing...
>
> SLiP 0.1: a "Sorta Like Python" shorthand syntax for XML
> SLIDE 0.1: a "Sorta Like an IDE" lightweight windows exe for SLiP editing
> SLiPpy 0.1: a SLiP package for Python, including a SLiP->XML library
> (sliplib.py) and source for SLIDE (slide.py)
>
> http://www.scottsweeney.com/projects/slip

This is nice work, Scott.  It's somewhat like a format I made up awhile ago,
although I don't use the "()".  I wrote a parser that throws SAX events so
you can serialize or build DOM trees with standard SAX handlers.

Here's the example from Scott's web page in my format -

test::
    bookmark::
        url::http://www.google.com
        title::Google
    bookmark::
        url::http://www.idiosync.net
        title::idiosync
; This is a comment line
; PCDATA content starts on the same line, after the "::"

I use "::" instead of ":" so you can use prefixed names.  You can put
attributes in by prefixing them with "@", like so:

location::
    @xlink:href::http://www.example.com

Either way, these little indented text formats are wonderful for whipping
out hand-authored XML.  I've done topic maps among other things with my
flavor.  Should be good for RELAX NG too.

Cheers,

Tom P