Re: WP conversion issues

James Tauber (jtauber@jtauber.com)
Fri, 4 Sep 1998 14:08:52 +0800


>BTW something I'd like to see a lot more of are examples of markup decision
>making and the reasoning behind them, like the Design Patterns movement in
>programming.

See Rick Jelliffe's SGML/XML Cookbook or David Megginson's Structuring XML
Documents ( http://www.xmlinfo.com/books/ )

>Anyway, given a lump of styled text with font changes, bolding etc, there
>seem to be several possible ways to map this.
>
>1) the obvious "HTML-style" of defining tags for <B> etc. and applying them
>inline, then adding the XSL definitions to match. This has a huge benefit
>of giving us HTML conversion in the same hit.

Just look at Word97's Save as HTML to see why this isn't trivial.

>2) some attempt to infer a document model, and defining the stylesheet on
>the basis of location (eg: the word "school" within paragraph 1). This
>feels very awkward but delivers cleaner text with separate styles.

Hard to do generically.

>3) conversion to RTF and encoding as same, on the basis that this will be
>parsable by other tools as an embedded format in future.

If you are happy to transport a presentational format around.

James