Re: [syndication] Re: Portal Layout Markup Language

["Jury Gerasimov" <jury@softshape.com>]

> > I plan to make a portal site about skinnable interfaces with, of
> > course, changeable HTML "skins". It means different fonts, color,
> > layout, pictures with the same content. The content will be in XML
> > format, the skins in XSLT, and result should be renderend using
> > different XSLTs to HTML.
>
> It seems to me the question is not the format of the portal, but the
format
> of the underlying data. What format are your sources in? Or, are you not
> planning on having modification of the sources, merely their placement in
an
> HTML layout? If so, you'd probably be better off without XSLT, and use
some
> sort of templating system.

I can't imagine how it's possible to go without XSLT. See, I have a portal
page builded from 3 different components:

- page layout : where the elements are placed on the page
- personal layout of every element
- the content of every element

The format of the content is the question I asked. Surely, it is XML (for
example, XMLNews or OCS), then it will be converted to HTML using its layout
description (presumably XSLT) and selected skin (presumably CSS or XSLT).
The whole page is compiled from these blocks using XInclude or similar
mechanism.

So the data (content) XML format is really the question. It should allow to
apply different views (skins) and be close to HTML tags (like XHTML); in the
same time it should keep the semantics (where is the header, where is the
article itself, what is the source, etc.) as much as possible (like
XMLNews). Is there any XML vocabulary for layout description which can save
the sematics ?

Regards,
Jury Gerasimov

Author of Chameleon Clock  - a tray clock replacement
with support of Winamp skins, alarms, and atomic time.
mailto:jury@softshape.com
http://www.softshape.com