Motivation

Generating valid HTML output has proven to be difficult. Because XML is much less forgiving than a browser it might be a good idea to do the harder job first.

• "Hard work now leads to less work FULLSTOP" -- Alan Cox

Wiki XML

The exact format of Wiki XML is still open. It would be nice to have a WikiDtd and as an extentions the MoinMoinDtd. See also: WikiXml

DOM tree vs tags

Because we want to reuse the result, the implementation should not be too DOM centric. There is an obvious analogy between generating a text/xml document and build a DOM tree. To make this more clear:

With implementation of .new_tag() .close_tag() it should be easy to reuse the code to produce text/xml or text/html.

Ideas/Problems

• Keep stack of all open tags as state (don't use the DOM tree directly for this)

• <strong>text<h1>text</strong>text</h1> must be converted to <strong>text</strong><h1><strong>text</strong>text</h1>

  • differ between
    • "breakable" tags (may be closed and reopened again)

      • <strong>, <em>, <highlight>

      • <sub>, <sup>, <code>, <underlined>

    • "unbreakable" tags (reopen creates a new entity we don't want)

      • <hN>

      • <table>, <td>, <tr>

      • <ol>, <ul>, <li>

      • <p>, <pre>

      • <a>

  • unbreakable tags must be opened and closed with correct nesting by the parser (enforce this by formatter)
  • breakable tags must be closed and reopened if needed by the formatter

• <p> needs special treatment

  • it must be opened and closed automatically if needed
  • parser should only need to say: new paragraph, please.

Opening a tag

Unbreakable tag

• ensure that tag is not already open if not allowed (raise error)
• collect all breakable tags (close and remember)

• close some unbreakable tags (<p>) ????

• check if enclosing tag is correct (????)
• insert tag
• reopen collected tags

breakable tag

• ensure that tag is not already open (raise error)
• insert tag

Closing tag

• collect breakable tags

• perhaps close some open unbreakable tags (</table> closes <td> and <tr>)

• close tag
• reinsert collected tags

comments

I do not see the problem with opening and closing tags. Nobody should want to write a new parser. I think there a re a lot of tools that can be embedded that know how to handle. If we use a DTD or a schema all should work by definition. The problem is, is tags are written by a new parser that can not read DTDs or Schemas. -- ThiloPfennig 2005-12-18 10:03:33