IRC log of ixml on 2025-03-04

Timestamps are in UTC.

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Meeting: Invisible XML Community Group
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Date: 4 March 2025
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Regrets: Nico, Steven
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Scribe: Norm
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Present: John, David, Norm, Bethan
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Present: +Fredrik
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rrsagent, draft minutes
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Present: John, David, Norm, Bethan, Fredrik
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Chair: Norm (pro tem)
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Topic: Accept the minutes of the previous meeting
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Accepted.
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Topic: Review of open actions
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No progress.
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Topic: Status reports
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Norm: I got NineML 3.2.9, includes an attempt to provide better diagnostics on failed parses.
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John: I've done something similar with my parser, it shows you the open rules.
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... The real problem is when you have ambiguity as well.
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Bethan: Even when you have ambiguity, the failure comes at a particular point in the parse. You can't be parsing more than one thing.
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John: There are two cases, one is a failure in the middle of the input. There's nothing else that can be predicted. That might be under a number of different branches.
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... The other one is where you got to the end of the input and there's nothing left. What was supposed to come next?
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Bethan: What I'm interested in working on are tools that will treat your grammar as a generator rather than a recognizer.
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... So that you can for fairly small grammars generate a sample of what is recognized.
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... So you can look at that and go "Uh, no, not that!"
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... Sometimes it can be very helpful to walk through a regular expression, for example, and recount what could be matched.
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... That process of talking through is a process of generating from the regular expression.
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John: Can you do this from any grammar without ambiguity?
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Present: John, David, Norm, Bethan, Fredrik, Jim
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Some discussion of generators.
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Bethan: I'm also interested in trying to work out what a grammar might be *trying* to match: phone numbers, UK post codes, etc.
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... And then point people to versions of those grammars.
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Fredrik: I've been thinking about rendering parts of the graph when a parse fails.
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Bethan: I wonder if we can make something like Guther's railroad diagrams; or maybe overlapping circles, some way to indicate what belongs to what and what is partial.
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John: Starting to find users finding really weird errors which is nice.
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Some discussion of the origins of the test case that demonstrated the problem of non-XML output (a single text node)
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John: It's worth making people aware that record-oriented can produce output that isn't well formed.
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Fredrik: With the current state of the parsers, it's very expensive to parse a huge file. It's more efficient to do it in a record-oriented way.
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Bethan: One of the things I've been thinking about recently is that we have a bunch of dynamic errors that are things like there not being a single root node, or two attributes with the same name on the same element.
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... Earlier the spec says that conformance is about processors and grammars, not the combination of a grammar and in input.
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... That being the case, I think these should be static errors on the grammar; not errors that are only thrown if a particular input produces not-well formed XML.
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... I'm convinced you can do it.
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John: Take the case of duplicated attributes, it depends on the input if that's the case.
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... If you said that it was a static error, that would be a problem.
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Fredrik: Do you have an example?
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Bethan: I think a single root element is relatively easy to work out; but suppressed elements make it a little harder.
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... I think we should think about removing the statement from the spec or we should talk about changing those to static errors.
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Fredrik: I sort of agree, but I think it might be easy to create a grammar that will create a root node or not. And that's entirely dependent on the input.
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Bethan: I think the spec implies that if a grammar could produce not well-formed XML, the grammar isn't conformant.
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John: Does that not imply that the universe of inputs is infinite?
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Some further discussion of what this analysis would look like.
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ACTION: Bethan to review the dynamic errors and see which ones might possibly be resolved statically.
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Topic: Issue #294, “parse tree” is not defined in the specification
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Norm: Let's wait for Steven.
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Topic: Perspectives on serialization
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Norm: Wait for Steven
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Norm: Should I try to improve that though?
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Thumbs up, consensus that it's worth making another pass to improve it.
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Topic: Next meeting
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No regrets given.
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Topic: Any other business
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None heard.
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s/No regrets given./18 March. Note that will be 1 hour later in the US. No regrets heard./
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s/Guther/Gunther/
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