Re: HTML backend for lout?

[Tim CHURCHES]

Further to my question below, Alister Pillow has suggested that a better 
approach might be to mark up documents in XML and then develop a conversion 
mechanism which transforms them into both HTML and lout document source. The 
steps required (as suggested by Alister, my comments in braces) are:

1) create a specific XML schema/dtd for your content and mark up your content. 
This schema should preferrably capture semantic content not just page layout 
information  {although the need to specify semantic content would make the 
whole thing much less portable bewteen applications - probably better to stay 
with the level of semantic content contained in the lout specification of 
document structure and otherwise concentrate on capturing the "page layout 
semantics" in an XML definition/schema}.

2) create the XSLT transformation stylesheet that maps your XML schema/dtd to 
HTML ( http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xslt )

3) create another XSLT stylesheet that maps your XML schema/dtd to lout

4) use James Clark's XT processor to do the transformations. 
(www.jclark.com/xml/xt.html) {an open source transformation engine in Java}

This seems like a sensible approach.

Alister also suggested that I ask the obvious question: has anyone done or 
thought about any of this already?

Many thanks to Alister for sharing these insights.

Tim Churches
Sydney, Australia

>>> <address@hidden> 10/07/99 10:16am >>>
Apologies in advance if this is already answered somewhere in a README or FAQ: 
does an HTML backend similar to the PDF backend exist for lout or is one 
considered? It would be great to be able to use lout to lay out documents for 
printing and distribution in Postscript and PDF formats and then produce Web 
pages from the same lout document source files. A lout to HTML preprocessor 
which parses the lout document source and inserts HTML tags (possibly keeping 
the lout symbols as comments or wrapping them in XML tags rather than stripping 
them out to allow a two-way conversion) would be an alternative to a lout 
backend. The main aim though is to start with a lout file and end up with an 
HTML file (not vice-versa). My C skills are not up to collaborating on an 
lout-to-HTML backend processor but I would be happy to collaborate on a 
lout-to-HTML preprocessor in Perl. 

Tim Churches
Sydney, Australia