Directory attribute grammars

Abstract

To publish documents we must take care of documents' structure and their formal layout. If a large document is composed by a lot of parts including text, images, code and so on, they will lay in different files; so file organization should also be a concern in the mind of the publisher. Normally, we focus on the structure and design, and forget file organization until this becomes a trouble, at production stage. The most common way to organize files is using the file system; directory structure is very flexible but quickly becomes disorganized. In this paper we present a way to turn a file system tree into an organized web page, using a grammatical formalism (hereafter called Directory Attribute Grammars: DAG = AG + Makefiles). We developed a tool (similar to a compiler) to publish different formats on the web, automatically, from the file structure and a DAG specification. This tool allows us to maintain a huge number of documents of different types, and process them systematically