Re: psgml - support for XML namespaces and schemas?

[Phillip Lord <p.lord@russet.org.uk>]

>>>>> "D" == D D Brierton <darren@dzr-web.com> writes:

  D> On Fri, 08 Nov 2002 10:47:46 +0000, Lennart Staflin wrote:

  >>> Is psgml very actively maintained? Do the developers hang out on
  >>> these NGs or elsewhere? I'm curious to know more about what's
  >>> planned ...
  >> Sorry, it is not being developed any more. I maintain it
  >> occasionally.

  D> Thanks for replying Lennart. After posting the original message I
  D> found out that you were no longer actively maintaining PSGML, and
  D> had put it on Sourceforge. (I joined the user and developer
  D> mailing lists.) I hope someone steps up to work on it - like I
  D> said I would myself but my Lisp just isn't good enough. It's
  D> worrying acually - I work with XML constantly, and PSGML is just
  D> lovely (although maintaining my catalog can be a bit hairy); but
  D> increasingly hybrid documents relying on namespaces, and
  D> therefore schemas for validation, are becoming the norm, and if
  D> PSGML doesn't get those features then I'll no longer be able to
  D> use it. And then what WILL I use? (That's rhetorical - not
  D> addressed to you personally!) Given that so many UNIX/Linux
  D> people seem to use Emacs/PSGML as their default XML editing
  D> environment I imagine that there will be a great many of us
  D> wondering what on Earth to do if PSGML doesn't keep up. This is
  D> now worrying me ...

Someone, submitted patches a while back to get PSGML mode to work
without a DTD, although obviously with reduced functionality. This, I
have found to be fairly effective. It offers completion, for instance,
of tags based on what is already in the document. It's not as good as
PSGML with DTD, but it's still function.

For using PSGML with xml-schema you can translate the scheme into DTD,
for which there are various tools available. This works fairly well,
and if memory serves well, psgml can cope with namespaces, although it
doesn't understand them (so you have to use a standard prefix
abbreviation). 

Of course, it would be lovely if PSGML were extended to cope with XML
from scratch, but it would be a lot of work. 

Phil