How It Works

How It Works: XML in Action

Technology was created with the intention of providing an adequate native formatting for every output media that may be used to view it -- from cellular phones to high-quality printers -- without manually recreating several versions of the same content. Today, the XML set of standards provides a powerful means to achieve this goal.

Basic ingredients used in preparing our solution are:

• XML, an emerging industry standard, provides an excellent means for separating contents from specific presentation features;

• XSL Transformations/XPath, a new language for manipulating XML documents, serves as a flexible and powerful tool for managing the contents and ascribing formatting styles;

• WML, a specialized XML-based markup language, has been used as an output format for wireless devices (cellular phones, PDA, etc);

• XSL Formatting Objects, a description language for high-quality visual presentation semantics, has been used to prepare printable versions of the pages;

• XEP by RenderX has been used to convert XSL FO (XSLFO) descriptions to PDF, thus bridging the new standard to preexisting basis of high-quality printing.

The interaction between various components is shown at the diagram. Only few transitions are now active; all others are still in the TODO list .

Here you can find a document illustrating XEP's role in the formatting transitions on the diagram - a schematic representation of the chessgame viewer sample.

The XML representation of the content is processed by several independent XSL stylesheets that generate various presentation formats: HTML, XSL FO, and -- soon -- WML. XSL FO (XSLFO) is further converted to PDF. There are two stylesheets for XSL FO (XSLFO): one places each page into a separate document (aligned with the HTML site structure); the other packs the whole site into one booklet.