Re: Dia & Schemas/DTDs

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Durk Strooisma wrote:

> Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 19:19:16 +0100 (CET)
> From: Durk Strooisma <durk@kern.nl>
> Reply-To: dia-list@gnome.org
> To: dia-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Dia & Schemas/DTDs
>
> Hi,
>
> We noticed that Dia doens't make use of DTDs or XML Schemas (for example to
> validate Dia XML documents). Even correct DTDs or XML Schemas aren't
> provided, which would be handy to validate Dia XML documents within XML
> authoring tools.

volunteers welcome!!!

> Probably there's a good reason doing it the way the Dia-people do right now.
> Performance? Complexity?

Those of us interested in Dia seem to suffer primariliy from lack of time
and also lack of expertise.  Until very recently i had loads of time but
not enough expertise.  I have been reading up on XSLT but have found it
very confusing but I do hope to get the hang of it and try and do some
things with the XML conversion system in OpenOffice (the Draw component
is sweet).  I hope to return to my studies next year but for the
forseeable future i will only have a little amount of time at the weekends
to spend on Dia, and i will be sticking to what i enjoy and best at and
that is drawing lots and lots of shapes.

> For us it would be very pleasent if Dia uses DTDs or Schemas for extending
> the program's functionality. Of course extending a DTD or Schema needs to be
> supported in the program itself too. But when implemented, functionality can
> be extending without modifying source code.

Help us to help you.  We all like standards the problem is that there are
so many of them and so little time.  Personally i really want to see Dia
use much more SVG, in fact the dia .shape files seem pretty good to me.
i was surprised how the .dia files work, how little information they
actually contain, it only contain references to objects so if someone
deletes the contents of your shapes/ folder or deletes an embedded image
then the diagram wont work.  After SVG support OpenOffice support would be
brilliant ... so little time.

Please do get involved.  Submit patches, makes suggestions, sponsor a
devloper, file bugs in bugzilla, every little helps.

Sincerely
Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/