Towards a canonical specification of document structures

This paper describes by means of an example, an approach to the derivation of a canonical specification of document structures. The example is based on simple word processing file formats, with very few sophisticated features. That is not to say that there is any limitation inherent in our approach, or that it would not be possible to support more advanced features in our canonical form. This paper suggests that Formal Specification techniques may be helpful in specifying interchange formate (effectively a canonical form); and, equally importantly, in specifying how existing implemented formate may be expressed in terms of a mathematically-specified generic format, so that transformations may be applied to an implemented format to yield that generic format. These transformations then determine the structure of the filters or conversion programs that must be used to convert from one format to another.