Hello Hussein. Thanks again for this information on format plugins. We are intending to prototype some format plugins for our own semantic tags. I am wondering whether it is really necessary to have a CSS file if we provide a two-way mapping between DocBook tags and our own semantic tags. We would like to minimize the number of entities we must maintain for this solution, and also to support configurability so that documentation writers may easily change tag mappings. Thanks, Carl
-----Original Message----- From: Hussein Shafie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 2:01 AM To: Carl Castro Cc: xmleditor-support at xmlmind.com Subject: Re: [XXE] Questions about Customizing XMLEditor Carl Castro wrote: > I realize that you do support rendering semantic tags via CSS. Do you know > of any techniques for minimizing overhead in maintaining both this CSS and > XSL transforming semantic tags to DocBook tags? I am wondering whether the > CSS and XSL transforms might be generated (CSS) or configured (XSL) based on > common settings. This seems to be a good idea. However we have never done that manually for our own needs and we don't provide tools to help you doing that. --- PS: I don't know if this could help you but XXE supports something called *format plug-ins*. (See http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/docs/dev/ar01s10.html) In your case, if you take the time to write a format plug-in in Java, your users could directly open XML documents containing semantic tags as DocBook. Then, they'll directly edit the ``DocBook view''. And finally they'll save the ``DocBook view'' as a semantic document. The user will think that she/he authors DocBook but in fact, transparently for her/him, through the use of a format plug-in, she/he will edit semantic documents. The format plug-in would use your existing "Semantic tags-->DocBook" XSLT transform to open a document. You'll have to write a "DocBook-->Semantic tags" XSLT transform to save a document. If this is possible (i.e. if there is a way to map DocBook to your semantic documents), you'll have a very elegant, easy to maintain, solution.
