Is anybody working on ...

[W. Eliot Kimber]

At 04:53 AM 4/30/98 +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>>Is anybody working on creating an abstration for preserving formatting
>>information inside or along with SGML documents, in cases where format
>>really is part_of the information. Two examples where such an approach
>>might make sense could be:

I think ADOBE has claimed that they will be able to preserve the SGML
structure inside a PDF object, which would be a reasonable solution for
documents where the mapping from the structure to the presentation is
fairly straightforward. It makes no sense at all if there's a lot of data
processing from input to output because the transform can't be run in reverse.

The only possible general solution is to bind a source document to either a
complete style spec (e.g., DSSSL spec) or to a formatting program object
that encapsulates the formatting. Any of the current and proposed packaging
schemes would handle this, possibly in conjunction with conventional uses
of XLinks, e.g.:

<?XML version="1.0"?>
<DocPackage xml:link="group">
<sourcedoc xml:link="document" 
  href="www.me.com/mydocs/mydoc.xml">Document source</document>
<stylespec xml:link="document" 
  href="www.me.com/mydocs/mydoc.dsl">Style spec</document>
</DocPackage>

Cheers,

E.
--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 95202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>

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