Some standard file extensions

This web page lists some standard file extensions used in gloss and some of its applications. There is no NECESSITY to use these, but doing so consistently will make your life easier!. Please use lower case letters in file names where possible, and always omit strange characters in filenames, ESPECIALLY the space character which causes problems in MANY MANY cases.

*.EXT.gloss

A gloss input file that will convert to *.EXT. EXT can be any extension of an XML format such as xml, html, xhtml, etc.

*.EXT.xr

An intermediate gloss file that will convert to *.EXT.

*.xml

An xml file of some kind.

*.html

An html file of some kind. This might be in fact xhtml or html4.0 or other flavour of html, but in the gloss system, this extension is NEVER used for an extension of xhtml that cannot be displayed on the vast majority of browsers including non-XML compliant browsers such as MS-IE. (For example, html files with MathML intended to be viewed in native html mode using css may have this extension, but html files with MathML intended to be viewed using MathML modes or a special plugin will have extension xhtml.

*.xhtml

An xhtml file of some kind, often incorporating namespaces and MathML. Separate extensions for html and xhtml are useful as already indicated, but also because most web servers serve files with extension .xhtml in a different way to this ending .html, and this difference is used by many browsers, especially the Mozilla-style browsers.

*.xsl

An xsl(t) stylesheet or transformation. (In this context, the words "stylesheet" and "transformation" seem interchangable, and so do "xslt" and "xsl". I prefer "transformation".

*.css

A css stylesheet for a html page. This isn't an xml file, but is very useful, can be edited by hand, and is the first way you would set about customising the look of your set of web pages. All gloss's authomatically generated (x)html is already set up to use css, so please use it.

*.mv

A mv or Modular-Vocabulary file. This is gloss's analogue of xsl: Gloss uses mv to define text-to-xml transformations in a similar way that xsl defines xsml-to-xml transformations. EXT.mv controls the transformation of FILE.EXT.gloss to FILE.EXT. And VER-EXT.mv controls the transformation of FILE.VER-EXT.gloss to FILE.EXT.

*.modes

An included file in a mv or Modular-Vocabulary file. Gloss provides many of these "modules" that can be chosen in an mv. In fact, most mvs simply consists of selecting a number of modes to load, optionally setting some parameters, and defining or selecting tha first "main" mode to execute.

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