[jats-list] eLife lens, XML and JSON

Subject: [jats-list] eLife lens, XML and JSON
From: Ian Mulvany <i.mulvany@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:24:27 +0100
Hi All,

Last week we launched a new way to layout articles online -
lens.elifesciences.org.

We discussed XSLT transforms from base XML, vs going with a
converstion to JSON. In the end we opted with doing an XML to JSON
conversion, and then feeding that JSON to a single page web app.

The converted JSON files are hosted on an s3 bucket, and served statically.

In this message I wanted to cover a couple of the reasons why we
followed this route. This is not a claim that our route is better than
another route, it's purely as an FYI for the people on this list. It
relates loosely to JATS, as JATS is the source format, and this
application should be seen as an application built on top of that
really great platform.

- We had a good set of tooling to hand based on JSON, as we were
working with the developer behind substanc.io

- We wanted to be able to serve the files statically, and allthough
you can do this with XSLT transforms in the browser, we judged that
working directly with JSON was going to be easier for us, it turned
out to be pretty good.

- We liked making relationships of interest to us in the document
explicit through a set of annotations, rather than leaving them as
implicit relationships encided in xref nodes.

Once we picked this route hving those explicit relationships in the
JSON allowed us to iterate on the front end very quickly. The tool we
launched went through a large number of front end iterations.

- Ian

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