Structured Text Interchange Format

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The Structured Text Interchange Format (STIF) is a subset of XHTML. It has only those few feature that most strucutured text formats support.

Contents

[edit] Q & A

  • Why STIF? To exchange structured text between different applications
  • Why not XHTML? There are too many elements, making it hard to write transformers from it to other source syntaxes or data models.
  • Why these features? The elements present in STIF map to what users can enter via wiki syntax or BB codes in popular systems.
  • Is STIF extensible? Sure, one can add any XHTML or XML element, but conformant STIF engines are only required to understand the STIF elements.

[edit] Related Work

  • Wiki Creole is the attempt to unify wiki source syntaxes for end-users. STIF unifies the content of structured text pages for easy processing in computers.
  • BB-codes are used in the comment systemts of many blog engines

STIF is a successor of WIF, the wiki interchange format.

[edit] Implementations

The project WikiPipes can crawl wikis as source text or as STIF. Using XSLT, the STIF code is transformat to other target wiki syntaxes.

[edit] Specification

  • Any UTF-8 string without "<" and ">" is valid STIF.
  • Any UTF-8 string using the defined STIF elements below is valid STIF.
  • Any UTF-8 string using other XML elements is also valid STIF, but STIF processors should/may ignore the extra elements.
  • STIF documents may have XHTML headers.
  • STIF documents may use the STIF elements.
  • Nesting is only allowed according to XHTML rules. I.e. one may not put a <h1> in a <table> without nesting it in <tr> and <td> first.

The STIF elements are: 


 headlines:       <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>

 block elements:  <p>, <pre>, <hr> 

 lists:           <dl>, <dd>, <dt>, <ol>, <ul>, <li>

 tables:          <table>, <tr>, <th>, <td>

 inline elements: <em>, <strong>, <code>

 images:          <img> with attribute ’src’, 

 links:           <a> with attribute ’href’

   For links within the wiki:
     - attribute 'class' must contain the class 'stif-internal' 
     - attribute 'href'  must be set to the name of the wiki page (no URL)
   For external links:
     - attribute 'class' must contain the class 'stif-external' 
     - attribute 'href'  must be set to an absolute URL

 Extensions under dicusssion for encoding further semantics:    <span>, <div> both with xml:id attributes

[edit] Document-STIF vs. inline-STIF

By parsing the input 

* hello

the resulting document-STIF is 

<html>
  <head>
    <title>STIF</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <ul>
      <li>hello</li>
    </ul>
   </body>
</html>

This is ideal to save as a stand-alone file.

The resulting inline-STIF is 

    <ul>
      <li>hello</li>
    </ul>

which is ideal for embedding in a web page. Note that 

 The fox <em>jumps</em> over the fence.

is also valid inline-STIF.

[edit] Doctype

These doctypes are valid for STIF documents:

  • HTML5
  • XHTML 1.0 Strict
  • XHTML 1.0 Transitional
  • HTML 4.01 Strict
  • HTML 4.01 Transitional
  • XHTML 1.1
  • XHTML + RDFa
  • XHTML Basic 1.0
  • XHTML Basic 1.1
  • XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0
  • XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1

[edit] Sample Document 

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
      <title>  ... a title ...  </title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <div>
  ... innerSTIF content ...
      </div>
    </body>
  </html>

[edit] Change Log

2008-11-10

  • added information about internal vs. external links

Removed on 2007-06-05 as many wikis do not support this. 

  <sub>, <sup>
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