RE: Automatic Omnimark to XSLT conversion tool?

[Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen <TRA@xxxxxxxx>]

> > >I would therefore like to know whether the list knows of any
> > >efforts of converting Omnimark scripts to equivalent
> > >XSLT-scripts, in order to reduce the number of technologies we
> > >use.
[..]

> Also, you said that OmniMark was used in an SGML publishing process.
> XSLT only works with XML, and can only serialize to a subset of XML
> (i.e. only the document tree itself). What you may find 
> yourself having
> to do is batch convert all your data to a simplified XML structure
> first, then build your production chain around that new structure so
> that you can use XSLT (which is why I stick with OmniMark for most
> serious work...I'm not a big fan of tailoring the problem to fit the
> solution). 

Thanks for your verbose reply.

As far as I have learned, Omnimark is used for several things, one being a conversion to XML for further processing in our direction (the printing process is another pathway).  The transformations needed at our level are quite simplistic though, and I have been able to reimplement most of them in XSLT already, even though it requires a smart XSL-transformation program to avoid building the whole data tree in memory.

The final data tables in XML are then loaded to Oracle with a tool I've written similar to OracleXML.

> I've actually thought about doing the opposite (i.e. an XSLT 
> to OmniMark
> converter), but haven't had the time, and there probably 
> isn't much real
> benefit in this either.

Now you got me curious.  What would the benefits be of such a program?

> 
> Sorry I couldn't be of more help,

Well, "No" is a fine answer.  I would just feel a little silly if such a beast existed already, and we did not test it for our purposes.


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