XML libraries (was ISO 8601 comments)

Peter Murray-Rust (peter@ursus.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 12 Aug 1998 20:14:15

At 11:44 12/08/98 +0000, Chris Hubick wrote:
[...]
> On the more general note...is there a repository for general
>domain nonspecific DTD's for stuff like times, dates, directory listings,
>etc? It would be nice if we could have one place for all this, and
>software for parsing and representing information stored in these formats.
>I mean, as soon as I find myself creating declarations for stuff like
>datetime I know someone else must have done it already, and probably have
>a Java class which can load itself using SAX events. What are the large
>companies such as Microsoft using for this in stuff like Office 2000?

I completely agree with this - I make this sort of suggestion every two
months or so on XML-DEV. The collection of additional libraries for XML (in
common languages like Java, Perl, C(++)) would be of enormous value. Some
should be directly related to XML functionality (e.g. isValidXMLName(String
version)) while others would provide CDC-like support. As an example,
isValidXMLName() is probably liftable from various parsers (I am sure it's
well exposed in XML4J).

It takes time, of course, and to do it as a virtual community would be an
enormous challenge. A first step would be to identify that functionality
where it already exists in publicly available software. And for authors to
announce this availability when the announce software.

P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg