This paper describes the specification and implementation of the development INES. The application of programming language technics and tools to document processing was the motivation for this project. INES was the result of that goal pursuit: a development for assisted construction of SGML based syntax-directed editors.
New needs are rising in document processing world. To be able to cope with these new demands documents should be available in several formats and plataforms. The satisfaction of this requirement will only be feasible if all the same representation, that should be a standard. In 1987, SGML was introduced as the standard for document production.
To join this standard, the use of a dedicated SGML editor is deeply advised. At present there are plenty of those editors commercially available. Some are simply new products while others are extensions to existing word processors. Most of them run the validation process in batch mode upon user decision.
Our environment, INES, is an editor generator that exploits the incremental parsing and validation paradigm. Both the generator and the generated editors follow this principle.
The generator accpts the SGML syntax as the specification of a document type definition (DTD) and generates a syntax directed editor for that type of documents. This approach offer some advantages: the structure of a new document is verified at edit time; the user only has to worry about content, not about syntax; the same environment is used both for creating a new editor and for producing new documents.