Exporting from SignPuddle

[Steve Slevinski]

Hi Jonathan,

BSWML is Binary SignWriting Markup Language.  It is equivalent to BSW 
but 3 times larger. The DTD is available online.
http://www.signpuddle.net/bswml.dtd

You can take a look at the other data equivalent forms on the BSW HTML 
Reference.
http://signbank.org/bsw/#m


SPML will be a text file and it will include BSW as text using hex 
values "0-9" and "a-f" with spaces to separate signs and punctuations. 

> I was all happy to upgrade to ISWA 2010 until I remembered last time I 
> had to upgrade from IMWA to ISWA 2008.
Yes, the transition does take a bit of work.  After the ISWA 2008, I was 
hoping we wouldn't need to update the ISWA ever again.  But a few things 
were bothering me, and Val had a couple of issues.  After some 
discussion, we both agreed that now was the time for a focused refactor 
before wide spread adoption.
http://www.signpuddle.net/mediawiki/index.php/ISWA_2010#Changes

I already have the conversion wired into SignPuddle. SignPuddle can 
create BSW 2010 from the ISWA 2008 data.  The conversion is 100% 
accurate, unlike the IMWA conversion which was only 99.9% accurate and 
much more complicated

SignPuddle will change over to the ISWA 2010 with SignPuddle 2 sometime 
this summer before the next school year.  The data for SignPuddle 2 will 
be available very soon.


> I just understood why you used the tokens.  I wish I had thought of 
> that!!! Good work!

I created BSW before I had a way to parse it.  I even considered using 
YEX and YACC.  But after much thought and research, I decided on tokens 
with regular expressions.  I can still remember the morning when I wrote 
out the first regular expression to validate an entire sign text.  The 
heavens opened up, the angels were singing, and a beam of light flooded 
my white board. 

Regarding BSW, you can see the JavaScript library online.  It has about 
400 lines of code and it's relatively easy to understand.
http://www.signbank.org/swis/bsw.js

The tokensplit function is the real workhorse.  If you can understand 
how it's used, you can understand the library.  There are 2 terms I 
didn't define properly: segment and unit.  A unit is either a sign or a 
punctuation.  A segment is a list of signs ending in a punctuation.

If you can reproduce the BSW library in your programming language, 
you're ready to use BSW.

Thanks for being on the bleeding edge,
-Steve