Can't open XML documents

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:23 -0600 20/12/06, Brad Simmons wrote:

>So, I'm assuming that my FrameMaker application cannot recognize either HTML or XML.

It can, but...

>How can I get it to do this? How can I get FrameMaker to open an XML document?

*Opening* the tagged document is not the problem: understanding what's in it and moving it into FrameMaker's document space is the issue.

You need to be in structured mode and either:

. Work with HTML or XML that conforms to a known standard (schema), or

. Have a DTD for the tagged files and to set up a structured application based on that DTD.

The former option should work pretty much 'out of the box' in structured mode, as FrameMaker comes ready to work with HTML, XHTML and DocBook. The latter option requires a pretty substantial learning curve and development time, as you need to grok structured Frame and EDD building. If you have a DTD (schema) that describes your XML/HTML files, you can use FrameMaker to create an EDD from it. You need both of these, as well as a FrameMaker template for the target files, and optionally a set of read/write rules, to set up a fully-fledged 'structured application'. (A structured application is not a compiled program, but FrameMaker's terminology for the collection of files that make round-tripping between naive Frame and tagged files.)

Disclaimer: I'm only just getting to grips with this stuff myself, so the true gurus may well pick holes in what I say here. However, I have got to the point where I can round-trip between Frame and XML on a proprietary schema (EDD) with about 95% success.

-- 
Steve