Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot be parsed/processed by software

Speaking about " human-readable specification documents", maybe we could
learn something on the topic of universal communication and understanding
here:

http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS05/cs05p35.htm,

and this earlier one:

Freudenthal, Hans. 1960. Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic
Intercourse, Part 1. Amsterdam: North Holland Pub. Co



On Sun, Jun 4, 2023 at 8:45 AM Michael Kay <[email protected]> wrote:

> >
> > For the QT4 specifications, the schema is here:
> >
> >
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qt4cg/qtspecs/master/schema/xsl-query.dtd
> >
> > But it seems unlikely that you didn’t know that, so I probably don’t
> > understand the question.
> >
>
> That of course is the general-purpose schema for the narrative text in the
> specifications. There are several more specialised schemas: the schema for
> the EBNF grammar files, which is at specifications/grammar-40/grammar.dtd,
> the schema for function specifications which is at
> specifications/xpath-functions-40/src/fos.xsd, and the vocabulary for the
> XSLT element syntax summary which as far as I can see does not have a
> formal DTD or XSD definition.
>
> The narrative text could have been written using any vocabulary suitable
> for technical documentation, with strong support for intra- and
> inter-document cross references, and terminology definitions, though it
> does have some more specialized elements corresponding to the W3C
> conventions for front matter and for linking to EBNF grammar.
>
> The more specialized vocabularies have been used by tools that do things
> like test data generation, test coverage analysis, automated parser
> generation, generation of skeletal vendor documentation and third-party
> training material, streamability analysis, and probably many other things
> I'm not aware of. They provide much more than markup for rendering
> human-readable specification documents.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica
>
>
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