Hi Devs, I'm working on implementing the style filtering functionality of xwiki-office-importer application. But first, i need to make sure that I'm clear about the policy and the correct approach towards filtering style information from imported office documents. I would really appreciate your input on this because I'm not an expert on either html or css :)
Ok, I plan to do two types of filtering. One is filtering various attributes of various elements (like removing bgcolor attribute from the <body> element). And the second one is filtering css related stuff. Let's take one by one. 1. Filtering attributes. This is quite straight-forward but i see two possible approaches. * The first approach is to keep a list of attributes that we allow when importing documents. We'll scan each and every tag and strip off any unwanted attributes present. * The second approach is to associate each tag with what attributes we allow for that tag. A list of legal attributes for common tags is presented here http://www.devx.com/projectcool/Article/19816. Similarly, we'll have our tag_name->allowed_attributes mapping and filter all other attributes present. I'm currently leaning towards the second option, WDYT ? 2. Filtering css styles. Ok, there are three ways one can associate css with html content. Let's take one by one. (i) External Style Sheet Well, AFAIK OpenOffice server does not produce this type of output when converting office documents into html. I mean it doesn't output html files that refer external css files. So I guess this is something we don't need to worry about. (ii) Internal Style Sheet This is something we need to worry about. OpenOffice server produces html pages with content like <head><style type="text/css">....</style></head>. Currently we strip off <style> tags completely regardless of the filtering mode (i.e whether styles are set to be filtered or not <style> tags get removed). Does this behaviour need to change ? (iii) In-line Styles This is the most common type of styling found (Example : <p style="....">). Present behaviour is to strip off this style attribute completely (if filterStyles is set to true). The question is, there are some inline styles that directly maps to xwiki 2.0 syntax like <p style="font-weight:bold">, what are we going to do about these ? In any case, I will have to parse the in-line style attribute string to filter those style directives that are not necessary. The complete grammar for in-line style attributes seems to be a bit complicated to be hand crafted (http://www.w3.org/TR/css-style-attr) although in OpenOffice converted documents i have only seen the "key:value;key:value" format. What should be the correct approach to parse the style attribute string ? Thank you very much for your ideas. :) [image: Asiri Rathnayake's Facebook profile]<http://www.facebook.com/people/Asiri_Rathnayake/534607921> _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
