h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm talking of the latter one. Context-free languages are far too restrictive to cover a natural language like English. The best I could end up with (after about five years of work) would probably be something like the grammar checker in Microsoft Word...

No, it's going to be an XML syntax checker basically, that will (if I ever make it work, which I think I can do) eventually be able to tell you if you've used any GuideML tags that aren't Approved - i.e. not recommended for the Edited Guide (as per the GuideML Clinic) and if you've used any tags that aren't actually GuideML tags, and so forth. A bit like h2g2's error messages when you get something wrong, but hopefully more helpful...

This is looking a way ahead though.

* goes off to study pushdown automata some more *

If they release the definitions file for GuideML it shouldn't be too hard to plug in an existing generic XML syntax checker. Anytime they update GuideML you could plug the new definition file in and it would still work. Minimal future development.

Yeah, but it's more fun to write it myself...

And are there any XML syntax checkers written in Pascal? Not that I've seen...

I'd rather write my own. It'll do me good.

That would be great, MaW. I'd really appreciate to get my error while I'm still offline.

One easy way to do a preview (that auto updated any tag changes on h2g2) would be to "borrow" the HTML from http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/UserEdit - you could use only the preview button part of the code for the form.

;^)#

Nice idea Bruce - but that would be cheating. I will of course have to make sure I can easily update GuidePost to match GuideML changes though... I'll have to take that into account when I design the syntax checker.

* ideas churning *