I think the answer to your question is somewhere between No and It Depends, but closer to No. It gets back to the structure vs. display issue. FrameMaker tries to give you both the XML world and the WYSIWYG world in one package. A more typical XML editor (like the new XML view in Frame 11) is just a text-based markup language editor that doesn't know anything about display. The XML output from such an editor gets turned into a formatted document by other software that transforms it (XSL and that stuff) based on the elements and attributes. This is how XML can get used in lots of different ways (single-sourcing). Different transformations yield different formatting based on the target display platform.
If FrameMaker, that display transformation takes place in real time in the interaction between the EDD and the para and char formats in your document based on the elements and attributes in your structure plus specific formatting overrides in the EDD. This means there is a temptation to build in a lot of attributes and formatting that is Frame specific. For example, some of my elements include whether or not I want the para or heading to be at the top of a page. This is entirely display related and something that would almost certainly be frowned upon if you were writing for multiple display environments. Therefore, if you are round tripping for distribution in other display environments, I would actually suspect that you would want to minimize the format related stuff in your structure, rather than maximize it because the framemaker-specific formatting would make less sense when transforming to other display environments. If you are round tripping just for editing purposes and it always comes back to FrameMaker for printing/PDF, then that is less of an issue and you can do what works best for you. Even in that case, you might not want to burden the authors with format related attributes to think about. Hope I've been at least somewhat coherent in my comments. I've probably simplified things a little. I don't do any round tripping, so I can't speak much to the pitfalls. Fred On 9/13/2012 6:29 PM, rebecca officer wrote: > Hi guys > If you're planning to roundtrip through XML, with different authors > using different XML editors, you'd need to have all the formatting in > the EDD, right? > Or am I on completely the wrong track in my ignorance? > Thanks > Rebecca > > -- Fred Wersan VT M?K, Principal Technical Writer 68 Moulton Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 T: +1.617.876.8085 x124 Email: fwersan at mak.com Get Realistic Background Traffic - up to 75% off! www.mak.com/YourPatternOfLife | Offer ends September 25, 2012 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers/attachments/20120914/ba4d2a5d/attachment.html>
