Syntax-From-Doc

Producing syntax highlighting, code completion, and context-aware code documentation in IDEs is hard. It is especially hard at SAS where the age and complexity of the SAS programming language begets quirks and edge cases. To support the features expected in modern IDEs, SAS has historically relied on syntax information produced in an unscalable, opaque manual process. This article presents a case study of the multi-year project to replace this legacy process with a "syntax-from-doc" REST service that stores and serves syntax information as JSON objects that are extracted from SAS XML documentation. The goal of the project is to produce a scalable, continually updated single-sourcing process by which all SAS syntax information can be made uniform and available across our myriad products and services. Though not without bumps and bruises to show for the stumbles along the way, this project serves as an interesting example of leveraging modern continuous integration/continuous delivery tooling, multiple markup languages, and a diverse technology stack to solve a hard problem.

On the use of XML markup language in comics criticism

Building upon Walsh’s Comic Book Markup Language (CMBL) used for encoding text features of comics documents, this essay explores how CBML can be modified and expanded using additional Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) features to reflect alternative theoretical and critical approaches to comics. In doing so, this essay argues that markup languages offer not only a means for analyzing encoded documents but also a means for analyzing critical approaches to documents. Because markup language reflects the critical stance of whoever produces the encoding, any revision to the markup potentially reflects a revision to the critical theoretical framework from which the encoder operates. As such, implementation of markup language in comics studies can function not only as a metalanguage for describing comics but also as a form of meta-criticism. To this end, this essay explores methods for incorporating CBML and TEI to reflect commonly opposed approaches to analyzing comics documents.

Extending Vocabularies: The Rack and the Weeds

In its simplest form a vocabulary is simply a set of words and phrases with predefined meanings. In this paper the term is used to mean a controlled vocabulary and, in particular, a controlled vocabulary in the context of computer markup languages such as XML or JSON or SGML. Vocabularies are created in specific contexts and for specific purposes. Like all human constructs they are flawed and need to be repaired and changed over time; as people use vocabularies they also gain understanding of the limitations in them and often want to extend them. Understanding these processes involves an understanding of the human needs involved: the social contexts in which people interact with and around the vocabularies. This paper characterizes some of these contexts and their properties, and in the light of this characterization describes changes to vocabularies, both successful and unsuccessful.

Twenty Years of Theological Markup Languages

ThML—the first open, XML-based markup language designed specifically for digital libraries handling theological collections—was first conceived in 1998, sparking a period of development in discipline-specific markup languages for theology that lasted until the early 2000s, when the dominance of the TEI standard led the field to stagnate. Despite the disappearance of the active developer communities behind most of the projects as well as technical improvements in the TEI, however, ThML and other languages developed during that period remain in use by several notable projects. After presenting a brief history of theology-specific markup, this article seeks to understand what its persistence tells us about the discipline-specific needs of biblical and theological studies that are still not being met by the TEI, and offers insights as to the lessons that may be drawn from these projects for the future of theological markup.

OpinionML—Opinion Markup Language for Sentiment Representation

It is the age of the social web, where people express themselves by giving their opinions about various issues, from their personal life to the world’s political issues. This process generates a lot of opinion data on the web that can be processed for valuable information, and therefore, semantic annotation of opinions becomes an important task. Unfortunately, existing opinion annotation schemes have failed to satisfy annotation challenges and cannot even adhere to the basic definition of opinion. Opinion holders, topical features and temporal expressions are major components of an opinion that remain ignored in existing annotation schemes. In this work, we propose OpinionML, a new Markup Language, that aims to compensate for the issues that existing typical opinion markup languages fail to resolve. We present a detailed discussion about existing annotation schemes and their associated problems. We argue that OpinionML is more robust, flexible and easier for annotating opinion data. Its modular approach while implementing a logical model provides us with a flexible and easier model of annotation. OpinionML can be considered a step towards “information symmetry”. It is an effort for consistent sentiment annotations across the research community. We perform experiments to prove robustness of the proposed OpinionML and the results demonstrate its capability of retrieving significant components of opinion segments. We also propose OpinionML ontology in an effort to make OpinionML more inter-operable. The ontology proposed is more complete than existing opinion ontologies like Marl and Onyx. A comprehensive comparison of the proposed ontology with existing sentiment ontologies Marl and Onyx proves its worth.

3. Presenting language

‘Presenting language’ considers the visual presentation of language. Using the schema developed by Michael Twyman, it shows how graphic language can be presented by considering the method of configuration and the mode of symbolization. The categories in the schema allow us to understand how information can be presented in different ways to enable different reading strategies and outcomes. Directed and open reading is discussed along with hierarchy in text, and how text and documents can be described systematically. Markup languages are used to identify text structure so that texts can be manipulated digitally in different ways depending on the medium used. Prescription and house style are also explained.

Structural Metadata & Standardization Failures: Just a Little Bit of History Repeating

The design of the Extensible Markup Language has placed a premium on modularity and promoting the re-use and inter-mixture of pre-existing tag sets in the service of new goals. While this design tends to promote standardization, it clearly does not guarantee it, as the multiplicity of competing XML languages for rights expression or word processing demonstrates. This paper examines the history and evolution of structural metadata standards within the digital library community to help identify factors leading to production of multiple markup languages competing for similar or identical ecological niches.

Specifying Hyperdocuments with Algebraic Methods

Algebraic specification methods, well-known in the area of programming languages, are adapted to present a tailored framework for hyperdocuments and hyperdocument systems. In this framework, a hyperdocument is defined via its abstract syntax, which is a variable-free term of a suitable constructor-based signature. Both the representation in a markup language and the graphical presentation on the screen as well as further representations are elements of particular algebraic interpretations of the same signature. This technique allows the application of well-known methods from the field of compiler construction to the development of hyperdocument systems. Ideas for its implementation in the functional language Haskell are roughly drafted. It is shown how XML-based markup languages with schemas and stylesheets can be defined in terms of this framework and how this framework can be extended so that it can deal with partially specified documents, called semi documents. These semi documents can be automatically adapted to the users' needs, which e.g. is helpful to ensure accessibility.