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Post by amarande on Jul 11, 2006 22:51:54 GMT
What are the details of the Project Aon XML structure (prior to HTML processing)? It has occurred to me that perhaps this could be made to become a sort of "gold standard" for online gamebook creation in general. This would be a major boon to the gamebook community, given that the Aon system produces gamebooks that are in fully compliant XHTML, and can be viewed on practically any OS and browser (unlike some of the other gamebook systems I've seen, even XML based ones like QML, which are frequently Windows specific and sometimes - as in QML's case, even require Internet Explorer (which belongs at the bottom of the Maakengorge ). Moreover, PA has produced a Perl script which easily generates flowcharts from a gamebook XML, which would also be of good gamebook authoring use. However, I'm not entirely sure of the current XML formats used, since it appears that the XML part of the system is mostly hidden and only seen by those who actually do the XML step of PA publication. It might be possible to discern it from the Perl script, but that's a bit more work than it really should take ...
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Post by Thomas Wolmer on Jul 12, 2006 20:26:09 GMT
We have a DTD (XML schema coming later... whenever someone feels like working on the tech details rather than on the books :-) ) and XSL transformations, stored together with the XML books in a CVS repository. Of course, these are moving targets, since we're continously working on adding more "intelligence" to system.
Making these available externally would probably require some improved documentation and some cleanup here and there first.
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Post by amarande on Jul 12, 2006 21:31:01 GMT
I'm on the list, actually. For some reason I figured that the forum might receive a more efficient response though (especially as the question at hand is tangential rather than directly relevant to PA).
I suppose if I had the files I could write some documentation, though I'm of course not sure how long the files will remain as they are, given that you said it was being worked on pretty often.
Right now I seem to be on something of a gamebook binge, reading much regarding LW and FF and considering writing some gamebooks of my own (this has mostly been caught up at the world design stage).
I suppose I could also help out with 18dotd (if no one has stepped forward since the last time the assignments list was updated) and 20tcon, though that's about all I can do for PA now (my copy of 19wb is abridged, and I had to sell all my New Order books a few years ago).
I've been mostly occupying my gamebook time lately doing SVG graphs of the Fighting Fantasy books (as such graphs of LW and GS are being worked on; besides, FF's fiendish difficulty tends to result in rather more need of a graph than the Magnamund books - Lone Wolf could make it to the end of a book easily, but your typical Fighting Fantasy hero will probably hit every death paragraph at least once without one ...).
Speaking of which, that perl script was quite useful; while of course I couldn't use it on a paper gamebook, it did give me what I needed to know (specifically, in the initial lines under the digraph statement) to make proper dot source files for gamebooks without them coming out ooogly like my previous attempts at such had (worse, my older attempts at svg graphs for gamebooks often had problems in Amaya, specifically that without zooming out several steps, I often could not scroll all the way to the right edge).
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