One of the objectives of GLOSS is that almost all well-formed XML should be authorable in GLOSS. This page covers some of the less-used features of XML, such as processing instructions.
We have seen how characters like & and < are automatically escaped by GLOSS when entered as part of text. Sometimes you genuinely want to use a particular escaped form, such as & or & or &. These character (or entity) references can be achieved in gloss by just typing the reference outside text mode. Thus
fruit-combinations combination [blackberry]&[apple] combination [lemon]&[lime] combination [strawberries]&[blackpepper]
generates
<fruit-combinations> <combination>blackberry&apple</combination> <combination>lemon&lime</combination> <combination>strawberries&blackpepper</combination> </fruit-combinations>
as you'd hope.
These are generated just like comments with text content, but with a "pseudo element name" ?target rather that !. Thus
?myapp [text for my app but note that ?> is
illegal in XML PI's and will be escaped by gloss]
<?myapp text for my app but note that ?> is
illegal in XML PI's and will be escaped by gloss?>
and
?latex [\\!]
<?latex \!?>
which might insert a backspace (\!) in a LaTeX output document from applications that recognise the ?latex instruction, a quite useful device sometimes.
XML declarations, of the form <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> could be generated as processing instructions using
?xml [version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"]
as the first line of a text input to gloss. This may be the only option for such a processing-instruction if gloss does not support the character encoding you are planning to use. (So in this scenario you'd generate a document in UTF-8 with a false XML and encoding declaration, and recode it to something else with another program.) However it is recommended that where possible xml declarations are generated in a different way via parameters in the MV file.
The relevant parameters are as follows (where "xml:" is an abbreviation for "{http://gloss.bham.ac.uk/mv/xml/xml}" which might be defined with <mv:declare-prefix>).
The file <glossdir>/lib/decl-xml.mv is a variation on the standard <glossdir>/lib/xml.mv that generates files in UTF-8 with the xml declaration <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>.
The standard GLOSS-xml MVs allow the pseudo-element !DOCTYPE to be present where a DOCTYPE declaration is allowed. This pseudo-element takes attributes of the form @system[URL] and @public[PUBLIC-ID] and its content is gloss-encoded DTD content. (See elsewhere for a discussion of GLOSS and DTDs.) Thus
!DOCTYPE @system[http://my.url.com/mydtd] @public[MY PUBLIC DOCUMENT ID] edible fruits
will generate
<!DOCTYPE edible
PUBLIC "MY PUBLIC DOCUMENT ID"
"http://my.url.com/mydtd" >
<edible><fruits/></edible>
Note that the root element name is found automatically.
It is possible to re-define the xml:doctype mode so that a different DOCTYPE is generated automatically. The html and xhtml mv's do this for example.
It may be required to use gloss to generate a document fragment rather than a document. A document fragment is an xml-like document that can be included in an XML document using one of the standard XML include mechanisms. So for example, a document fragment may contain more than one element at top level. To generate these just use <glossdir>/lib/docfrag.mv.
For example,
apple latin[Malus pumila] french[pomme] pear latin[Pyrus communis] french[poire]
produces
<apple><latin>Malus pumila</latin><french>pomme</french></apple> <pear><latin>Pyrus communis</latin><french>poire</french></pear>
Similarly GLOSS may be used to generate DTDs with <glossdir>/lib/dtd.mv. The GLOSS encoding and syntax for DTDs is similar to that for gloss itself except it heavily uses pseudo-elements starting with an !. This syntax will be discussed elsewhere.
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