Adobe 65030365 - FrameMaker - PC Developer's Manual page 542

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I m p l e m e n t i n g a n X M L o r S G M L a p p l i c a t i o n i n t h e
F r a m e M a k e r p u b l i s h i n g e n v i r o n m e n t
The application that prepares the formatted version applies rules indicating how the
taskmodule, steps, and so on of the markup example are to appear. In this example these
rules:
•
Put the heading in a large, bold font.
• Generate the sentence, "This procedure requires advanced certification" from the value
of the skill attribute.
•
Number the steps in the procedure.
Notice that the values of the time attributes do not appear in the formatted text. The rules
that drive a different application—a scheduling program, for instance—might use the time
attribute to allocate the mechanic's time, for example. Or it might assemble the entire
maintenance procedure (possibly thousands of such maintenance cards), and add up the
times for each step to estimate the maintenance schedule.
Markup Editing and Publishing Applications Two important classes of markup
applications involve creating (editing) and publishing documents. Tools from different
vendors take different approaches to the two applications. Editing tools are used to create
markup documents; publishing tools produce formatted results from existing markup
documents. For example, Datalogics' Composer is a publishing tool that operates on
completed SGML documents using FOSIs (Formatting Output Specification Instances) to
specify page design and the visual characteristics applied to various structural elements.
James Clark's JADE is a non-commercial publishing tool that uses DSSL (Document Style
and Semantic Specification Language) to specify the formatting rules of an application.
Many XML rendering applications use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to express the visual
appearance of an XML document.
Since users can best work with an editor if they have some visual indication of the
document's structure, applications for markup text editors, such as Adobe FrameMaker,
Softquad's XMetaL, and Arbortext's Epic, also require some formatting specifications. Some
editors also provide for rules to determine:
•
How closely documents under development must conform to a DTD
•
Options for listing available elements for the user
•
Whether to automatically insert elements when the user creates a new document or
inserts an element with required sub-elements
•
Whether to prompt for attribute values as soon as the user creates a new element
Some tools address either the editing or the publishing application. FrameMaker is a single
tool that addresses both. Although FrameMaker can be used for either one in isolation, its
strengths include the ability to create new structured documents (or edit existing ones) that
are ready for publishing without additional processing. This pairing allows a single set of
format rules to support both tasks. Thus, less effort is required to configure FrameMaker
than to configure separate editing and publishing tools.
Developing XML or SGML Publishing Applications 524