UCL Discovery

Abstract

The use of the WWW as a communication medium for software engineers is limited by the lack of tools for writing, sharing, and verifying formal notations. For instance, the Z specification language has a a rich set of mathematical characters, and requires graphic-rich boxes and schemas for its specifications. It is difficult to integrate Z specifications and text on WWW pages written with the current versions of HTML, and traditional tools are not suited for the task.We present a Java-based tool for rendering Z specifications within HTML documents that can be shown on every WWW browser with Java capabilities. Being a complete rendering engine, text parts and Z specifications can be freely intermixed, and all the standard features of HTML (such as links, etc.) are available outside and inside Z specifications. Furthermore, the extensibility of our engine allows additional notations to be supported and integrated with current ones.