Introduction
to Annotated XML
When
the XML 1.0 Specification was created, it contained lot of information
where some of them were self-explanatory and some of the information was
confusing.
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To give explanation
to the confusing terms you need to have a separate document that explained
the confusing terms. Hence you would be having a main document which has
links to the smaller documents that give you explanation of the complex
terms. This type of main document with links to other small documents
is called the annotated document. This type of annotated web page document
can be created based on the Annotated XML Specification created by Tim
Bray. To understand how a annotated XML document would look like you can
see the page http://www.xml.com/axml/testaxml.htm
The annotated
XML specification addresses the problems created by confusing terms in
the XML Specification. To create a annotated document you need two files.
One which contains the source file and the other contains the annotations.
In the link given above Tim Bray has used xml.xml and notes.xml, where
xml.xml contains the XML specification and the notes.xml contains the
annotations. A Java program which uses the Lark processor reads the .xml
files and creates a target.html file and many other small html files that
contain annotations. The target html file that is created contains the
annotated XML specification. If you view the link given above you will
understand how the annotated XML works.
In designing
the annotations the XLink and XPointer technologies are used since they
point to any arbitrary locations inside a document. There are two kinds
of XLinks and the xml:link=”extended” is used in designing the
annotations. The annotated spec contains a main linking element called
x. The x element and its attributes are given here below:
<!DOCTYPE
Annotations [
<!ELEMENT x (here|spec)+>
<!ATTLIST x
xml:link CDATA #FIXED "extended"
inline CDATA #FIXED "true"
content-role CDATA #FIXED "commentary"
content-title CDATA #FIXED "Annotation"
id ID #REQUIRED> ]>
<Annotations>
<x id="id-of-firstlink"> ... content of first link ...
</x>
<x id="id-of-secondlink"> ... content of second link ...
</x>
...
</Annotations>
You could
note that the x element contains one here element and many spec elements.
The here element contains the text of the annotation and the spec element
points to the location of the annotation in the XML spec. For more information
on the here element and the spec element check the link http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/09/exexegesis-0.html?page=2
Once the
xml document and the main xml document that contains the spec are ready
a Java program that does the processing by using a Lark processor gives
a html document that contains links to the annotated html documents. This
would be the final output and the following are the steps involved in
producing the target html file and the annotated html documents.
1. Parsing
the annotations: using an instance of the Lark parser the program reads
the annotations file. At the end of this step a variable points to the
root of the annotations document tree.
2. Create a vector of XLinks in the document.
3. The XLink vector is traversed. The spec XPointers are traversed.
4. Create the main html file with images that hyperlink the annotations
required.
5. Write the Annotations files: For each of the annotations found in the
notes.xml we create a new annotation html file. The id attribute is used
for the filename.
for (i = 0; i < notes.size(); i++)
{
if (notes.elementAt(i) instanceof Element)
{
child = (Element) notes.elementAt(i);
title = child.attributeValue("id");
out = new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream(
"notes/" + title + ".html"));
out.println("<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>"
+ title + "</TITLE>");
...
The code
snippet given above is used to iterate through the elements of the notes.xml
file and create separate html files for annotations.
Thus creating
an annotated specification will really add value to the reference materials
on the web. Using XPointer will load all the document in the memory and
excessive memory is required to process such documents.
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