Re: `High-level' format specifications with XSL?

[Paul Grosso <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:28 1998 07 07 -0400, Kai Grossjohann wrote:
>... I want to use a level of
>abstraction which is higher than the one provided by
>XSL-with-HTML-flow-objects (as I understand it).  I don't want to
>specify things like whether headings should be bold or underlined.  I
>want to specify I want a heading, and what a heading looks like should
>be defined by someone else. ...

Then it sounds like what you need to do is:

1.  define some XML document type definition with elements like 'heading'
    and such--let's call this the MLPL (mid-level presentation language) DTD;
2.  define one or more XSL transformation specs that map your XML source 
    documents into an MLPL document;
3a. define one or more XSL stylesheets that map your MLPL documents into
    flow objects and properties that can be processed by some tool into
    something that some formatter can handle, and/or
3b. define one or more XSL transformation specs that map your MLPL documents
    into HTML plus CSS that give you the desired view in a browser.

Then running an XSL processor on your input document and the transformation
spec developed in 2 above gives you the level of abstraction that I think you 
want, e.g., mapping input element types to headings.

Twiddling the XSL trans spec/stylesheet developed in 3a and/or 3b above affects
the definition of what a heading looks like.

I am not familiar enough with the various tools to know how far you can get
with this scenario in our current version of reality.


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