GXL stuff

[Yuzo Kanomata <yuzok@ics.uci.edu>]

Hi All,

While looking for TkSee/SN stuff off google, I chanced on an old U of 
Ottawa site (2/11/2001) with a C/C++ parser with TA++ and gxl output. I 
have not downloaded or played with the parser yet. I have to check to see 
if it needs to run on an old Solaris box or not.
<http://www.site.uottawa:4333/dmm/index.html>

But I did get one set of useful things from the site -- gxl example files!

I ran my BindingTest program on all of them and it ran fine. Of course I'm 
not looking into every attribute and element, but the output looked good.

Also, just to let you know on the issues I'm looking into with regard to 
the data bindings:

1. GXL tag must contain the attribute xmlns:xlink="www.w3.org/1999/xlink".

Example:
<gxl> -- this will not parse!
<gxl xmlns:xlink="www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> -- this will parse

Status: I'm looking into the definitions in the dtd and xsd. So far only 
about 5 files in the GXL examples off the GXL website won't parser because 
of this. I'll be consulting some of our local XML XSD experts on this. The 
data bindings should not substantially, so working with the alpha release 
should be fine for now.

2. <?xml version="1.0"> is cut out of the GXL document.

3. Whitespace ahead of tags may change.

Example:
  <tag> -- has 3 spaces in the in_file
     <tag> -- has 6 spaces in the out_file

4. Empty elements lose their explicit end tag.

Example:
<tag></tag> -- in_file
<tag/> -- out_file

Status: Nonissue. These are semantically the same, but this may throw some 
people.

5. What happens to comments? -- They stay in! another non-issue.

Yuzo