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RE: Word and amazon.com (was: PDF a "book" of Word files )
Subject:RE: Word and amazon.com (was: PDF a "book" of Word files ) From:Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 9 Oct 2003 13:02:32 -0700 (PDT)
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Bill asked:
Why bother to do that? If you keep the content separate from the
formatting, you can do whatever you want by simply changing the
stylesheet used to format. It's the stylesheet that should govern the
format, not the content file.
in response to my hypothetical:
So, what I was picturing is a well formed (heck even valid) xml document. Crack that bad boy open in Word (or Frame, or whatever) AS an xml document. Apply a template that formats the xml. Then do a save as a DOC (or an FM file, or whatever). This way, the source xml file remains pure xml but you have a properly formatted output.
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I suppose I was envisioning two things:
1. A situation in which someone (client, boss, CEO, whatever) wants some content that you have written up in xml to be delivered in a specific _file_ format, like a DOC file (as opposed to html or pdf). Why would they ask? I don't know, but I've had some weird requests lately for this kind of thing so maybe that's why it came to mind.
2. I was wondering if there would be an _easy_ way to do this other than building the XSLs, which require anywhere from a little to a lot of programming depending on the beast you're working with, or writing a program to do it, or even using something like Xalan.
But now that I think about it more, I suppose this hypothetical would rely on the XML doc being written in the order it should appear (for example, chapter one then chapter two), in which case you're already violating the "no format" law of xml because if the file were truly format independent, it wouldn't matter if chapter two came before chapter one, the xsl would sort it out........literally.
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