Re: [FrameSGML] Re: Frame+SGML Tutorial?... Not really, but way interesting

[Marcus Carr <mrc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Despopoulos wrote:

> Have you ever heard of FRED?  I just found this while
> cruising around re the above topic.  FRED will take SGML
> that does NOT include a DTD, and then make a guess at what
> the DTD should be.  I guess it makes one of the many
> possible working DTDs.  Not that this is going to help
> anybody, but you must admit, it's interesting.

FRED is quite interesting - I have tested it with complex documents in the
past and it makes pretty good guesses about the structure. It keeps it as
tight as possible without going overboard. The problem that I ran into last
time I considered implementing it was that it's a very difficult product to
licence. I put a client in contact with them, but I don't believe they were
able to reach an agreement. FRED has really been beaten to the post by the
DOM (Document Object Model) which does the same sort of thing - it doesn't
build the DTD, but it does store the whole document in memory as a tree.
Building a DTD based on the tree would be reasonably simple (though it seems
that DTDs will be replaced by schemas anyway).

> For example,
> you could use something like this to Help Maker read
> well-formed (but not valid) XML, and create an EDD for it.

I wrote a rudimentary application in OmniMark that took a document, created
a DTD and then checked the document for well-formedness/validity. Every
element allowed ANY instead of a content model, so there were no
restrictions on occurrence other than those imposed by the documents
themselves. This is of little use structurally, but if you prefer to do your
development from within FrameMaker+SGML (as I understood Dan Emory does),
then it will allow you to get a valid document into FrameMaker+SGML.


--
Regards,

Marcus Carr                      email:  mrc@allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
Allette Systems (Australia)      www:    http://www.allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
       - Einstein



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