DTD for Kdenlive

[Camille]

Hello Nicolas,

Le 27/05/2018 à 01:04, alcinos a écrit :
> Well, the kdenlive's xml is being parsed by mlt at the core. So all 
> the structure must be MLT compliant enough for the parsing to be 
> successful :)
> Basically, kdenlive stores a lot of additional properties (usually 
> prefixed by "kdenlive"), that are parsed and ignored by MLT.
Ok, from what I understand, "prefixed" used to be in the xml sense, like 
for the names of elements and attributes (and so that would have 
required a specific name space, as mentioned by TheDiveO in one of its  
article), but now it's just a convention inside the "name" attribute, so 
we're fine on this.

> Besides, kdenlive abuses a bit the mlt structures to perform some 
> "tricks": for example, we need to have a fake timeline to store the 
> bin clips, otherwise the bin clips that are not used in the project 
> wouldn't be saved. What this means is that even though the file should 
> be "valid" in the sense that MLT knows how to parse it, there is a 
> high probability that MLT is not going to playback the project directly.

So, the idea of having a kdenlive specific dtd  could make sense ; but 
that may not even be the first thing we need: I have just done a short 
test with a simple ShotCut file (which have a .mlt extension, so I 
assume they should be quite close to what MLT expects, also considering 
that  the app is written by MLT's main contributor), and validating 
against mlt-xml.dtd spits out the same errors as a Gen3 kdenlive file, 
so logically most of them disappear with the tentative kdenlive's dtd. 
And the remaining errors, like the space in the "main bin" ID are 
similar in both Kdenlive and ShotCut, so I would guess it could/should 
be fixed at MLT's level.
On this precise point, can you confirm that the spelling of "main bin" 
comes from MLT and not Kdenlive  ?

The idea would then be to propose upstream some changes to mlt-xml.dtd 
that would be generic and create a specific dtd for the remaining 
kdenlive-only elements.

>
> Hope this helps,

Thanks, it helps a lot indeed :-)
Camille