XML and FrameMaker

[Pedro Pastor]

Thank you very much to you for your response.
 
I can see I misunderstood some point on this topic, but some doubts
still remains in the roundtrip process. In any case I didn’t mean that
working with a “tag-based” editor + “style-sheets” is better than
working with FM (from the authoring point of view), but I need to
demonstrate that to people (and to me) for convincing them to invest
time and money on it.
 
I’ve read the Adobe documentation on this topic and the XMLCookBook
tutorial, but (I think) this is too short and simple for the importance
and complexity of the matter. In order not to pester you with too many
questions, I would appreciate some information source for a deeper
understanding of the way of dealing with XML in FM.
 
In addition to this, I’d like to pose you some more questions:
 
1)       What is the relationship between DTD and EDD in an structure
application:
 
I though DTD would direct structure editing (element catalogue,
structure editor, 
) and EDD would maintain the mapping between
structure and presentation, BUT it seems it is not the case, at least
not for XDocBook.
 
In XDocBook application FM DocBook structure is not DocBook compliant
(for example: FM “Chapter” is  DocBook “chapter”. Also, the FM “Head”
element is not a DocBook Element): That’s the reason why we need
Read/Write rules. No need for if FM would use the DTD directly.
 
NOTE: I’m not telling the R/W Rules mechanism is not an important one. I
see it is needed if FM is using a kind of internal structure definition
and I’d like to export that structure to be compliant with and external
application DTD. On the other hand, for modifying structures on
Import/Export I would not have re-invented the wheel, XSLT (or DSSL for
SGML) could do the job much better. 
 
On the other hand, where is the whole set of “Document Definition” rules
for a document type? I couldn’t find an EDD containing the whole DocBook
grammar. 
 
2)       Is really EDD (internally) supporting the document structure
(Schema) information?
 
 If that were the case, having EDD store structure and presentation
information is not a good practice. I would expect to have a
“Structure-Definition” document spitted form a “Presentation-Definition”
document. I think we should agree in this point (¿?). I would fear to
touch my precious “Document Type Definition” documentation just to note
down that some font has to change (today) and some other feature
tomorrow !!!!  Then, this decoupling is compulsory (I think).
 
3)       Another set of doubts is (stemming from the previous troubles)
the appropriate strategy for designing my own XML application in FM. For
example, is trying to make profit of some already designed structured
application and like to “Re-vamp” some structured template: How can I do
that? How can I get the “grammar” for that structured document and the
presentation mapping for that grammar?
 
 
 
Well, I seems like I’m at loss on this field, and, as stated before, I
wouldn’t like to bore you with many (and maybe naïve) questions. And I
would appreciate answers as I do references to interesting sources of
information.
 
Regards,
 
 
Pedro