On Feb 17, 2010, at 10:24 AM, Chris Despopoulos wrote: > Getting back to FrameMaker, I believe FrameMaker does express > constructs that are specific to its own processing, but those > expressions are within spec, and so the XML would be considered > pure. The practical question would be, can you properly render a > document from FrameMaker-generated XML, no matter what process you > use to render it? In other words, is the FrameMaker XML tied so > much to the proprietary system that it defeats the purpose of XML? > I believe FrameMaker does not tie you to a proprietary system. But > if you want to take full advantage of the proprietary FrameMaker > system, then you can use the special, proprietary constructs.
Interesting discussion. Let's take conditional content. If you use FrameMaker's conditional text feature to mark up conditional content, FrameMaker will output the conditions in the XML file as processing instructions. Other XML authoring tools do not know what to do with those PIs. Therefore, you lose your conditional functionality if you move the information out of FrameMaker. However, you can use attributes to mark up conditional information. You can show/hide based on attributes in FrameMaker, and other tools understand attributes and, usually, the idea of filtering based on attributes. (You may or may not be able to show/hide, but when you render to your final output, you can filter as appropriate.) So, if you use the original FrameMaker model of conditional text, you will have interoperability problems. There are other features with similar issues. Regards, Sarah Sarah S. O'Keefe President okeefe at scriptorium.com phone: 919 459 5362 blog: www.scriptorium.com/blog twitter: sarahokeefe