Metrophorums

[cijil]

I've got a preliminary version of the revised ComicsML DTD up for perusal now. The actual DTD itself lives at http://metrophor.com/comicsml/dtds/comicsml-0.3a.dtd and there's also a friendly, nicely hyperlinked version viewable at http://metrophor.com/comicsml/livedtd/0.3a/ for your perusal. Before reading, you should know that

THIS IS NOT THE FINAL VERSION

You'll notice a lot of changes have been made from Jason's 0.2 version, and none of the old DTD elements made it in. This is just the way the new DTD looks; I fully intend to go back and put the deprecated elements in for backwards compatibility, but it's a lot cleaner and easier to see what ComicsML looks like this way. So please, anybody who's interested take a look and leave a comment here.

[cijil]

Here's what's changed between 0.2 and 0.3 (proposed):

Elements removed:

* last-built - in favor of a more general date attribute
* panels
* soft - now included in the <inflect> element
* interro - now included in the <emote> element
* bang - now included in the <emote> element
* interrobang - now included in the <emote> element
* silence - now included in the <emote> element
* panel-desc - in favor of the more general <description> element
* narration - wrapped into <speech> or <caption>
* thought - wrapped into <speech>
* text - this can be provided in-line with the element

Elements added:

* book
* chapter
* page
* middlename
* nickname
* em
* s
* sfx
* inflect
* emote

I thought a long time a vacillated a great deal on whether to turn things like <title> and <url> into attributes. If I were designing the DTD from scratch, I think I would. However, since they're already out there in the 0.2 version and people who have already coded their applications have written them in, I suspect it's better to leave them as they are. If anybody has persuasive arguments one way or the other, by all means: speak up!

For a full and complete list of how elements relate to one another, please see the DTD referenced above.