DTD explorer

A graphical utility to navigate
a digested DTD

DTD explorer is a java 1.1 applet and application that loads a DTD and displays the parent/child relationship, allowing you to quickly understand the possiblities of the grammar of a DTD.

Current version is 1.0b5, posted on June 10th of 2001. Please see the release notes.

This project is in dormance. Some update would be needed in order to correct the root website activemath.org and not anymore mathweb.org.

This utility is dedicated to Michael Kohlhase, author and father of OMdoc, to help him and us see the delicacies involved in an XML representation of mathematical content. For authors of DTDs, this should help to see a «digested» or finished DTD appearance. For users of a DTD, this protects us against the too many greps involved with entities and other things.

It should allow us to respond quickly to the question: where can I have a <code> tag inside an <example> tag or which tag should I go through to find my favorite content...

Since version 1.0b1, a history is provided when walking long paths of parent/children.

Have a demo, using the OMdoc 1.1 DTD, or using the combined ActiveMath and OMDoc 1.1 DTD (version of Feb 13th 2007)

Installing

Unzip, unstuff and/or untar the files:

Classic Macintosh users should now use the tar.gz archive which contains a MacBinary encoded application file (DTDexplorer.bin is its name). MacOSX users should know they are on a Unix system, an MacOSX-application is provided in there.

For those who prefer installers, InstallAnywhere prepared installers are available from the installer's page.

You should sooner or later end up with a directory, your browser and its friends might actually have done it all for you.

Place that directory where you want...

Running

You will need a java virtual machine to run this... version 1.1 is OK, has only been tested on Linux Blackdown 1.1.7B, MacOS MRJ 2.2.3 and MacOSX beta.

Having the command-line shell at hand with java in your path, cd to the chosen directory and type

possibly followed by a URL or filename to load the DTD from.

(the yourClasses.zip is something for java 1.1 where the classpath always needs to contain the system classpath, usually contained in $JAVA_HOME/lib/, java 1.2 editions don't need this. Including your previous classpath might be a solution).

Macintoshers can use the application provided with the tar.gz archive, after un-macbinarying it. This will behave just as if there were no parameters and thus open a file-dialog. This should, one day, become a droplet.

Some winows and unix gurus might be real appreciated with a startup script, possibly some form of iconizable thing... It might be the simplest for you to use the demo applet.

Thanks to report any failure or success for all sort of platforms (in particular Windows, yes, yes).

Using Look at the image on the right... The top-field serves as input to search an element by name. Type it and press return. The middle zone just displays the element name The left column displays the possible parents of that element, a click on one of these elements will replace the current element with the picked one... The right colum displays the possible kids of that element, including attributes whose named are preceded by the prefix «attr - » The content displayed in the middle is a DIGESTION of the DTD, it is not the original DTD, in particular all the entities are resolved and not displayed, possibly resulting in very long lines. License This software is delivered under the GNU general public license available here.

Feedback

Please do. It looks to me this utility might be very useful if customized to fit the needs of folks... I'd love an icon for example...