<snip> <?xml version="1.0"?> <Doc> <Title><Bold><Font RelSize="+2">My Heading</Font></Bold></Title> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left" Empty="Y"></Para> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left">This is my test paragraph. How about <Underline>underline</Underline>, <Italics>italics</Italics>, and <Bold>bold</Bold>?</Para> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left" Empty="Y"></Para> <Para LineBreak="no" Align="left">This is a bulleted list</Para> <List> <Item>My first bullet</Item> <Item>And the second bullet</Item> <Item>Last bullet</Item> </List> </Doc> </snip>
The above XML is not more useful than good old HTML - it mixes content and presentation, it provides no meaningful description of the content! What does <bold> mean? How can this content be reused in the future? How can a semantic query determine what is in <italics>? Is <italics> telling me I'd find a citation inside, a reference, an author's name? You are not semantically describing the content, you're repackaging HTML into different tag names. You're not managing your content any better. <snip> <span class="content-heading">My Heading</span> <br clear="all"> <p class="content-text" align="left"> </p> </snip> By the way, this HTML and CSS is quite invalid (very much like what Word produces ;) <snip> There's no sense in trying to beat Word as an authoring tool. I've seen a lot of WYSIWYG authoring tools, and they all fall short. Why go through the trouble </snip> A pencil and paper is a very widely used content authoring tool as well, but the problem is that content authored that way can't be reused. Same goes for Word - companies are spending millions to try and salvage information out of Word documents. And what are they finding out? That it can't be reliably done programmatically because the goal is to transform to meaningful semantic markup and Word does not mark up the content semantically. That makes it very worth the trouble to create a better tool for authoring content IMO :) best, Iva -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
