Automatic generator of XML documents editors based on attributed grammars

Abstract

Despite being relatively unheralded, application-to-application communication of data in standard format still requires human intervention in vast majority of electronic commerce transactions. The perception of the entire electronic data interchange paradigm has to take into account manual data entry of relevant information. Efficient data entry requires de facto standards to capture and structure data of end-users so they can be automatically processed by appropriate applications. The XML meta-language, which is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages, highlights a step toward capturing structured data from graphical interfaces. In fact, XML provides Document Definition Types (DTD) to describe a class of documents in terms of constraints on their structures. However providing on-the-fly graphical forms to capture data based upon predefined DTDs raises a challenge in supporting advanced web-based applications. In this paper, we present a system that is able to automatically generate web forms or editors to capture data with respect to predefined DTDs. On the completion of the data entry the web--based form builds appropriate XML documents. The system receives a DTD as an input and relies on attributed grammars to associate semantic to its elements and produces on-the-fly an HTML-based editor.