Towards generic layouts for multi-channel publishing: "XF-extensible formatting"

Abstract

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has become the lingua franca for information integration, e-Business and metadata. It is also invading to office documents and hence becoming the format for organizational and end-user documents. XML documents themselves do not contain information about styling, i.e., how they should be rendered for print, screen, or other channels of publication. One document type may need numerous styling definitions as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) or XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) stylesheets for differing multi-channel publishing purposes. Producing style definitions with differing styling languages may be quite tricky for end-users. The management of a myriad of formatting definitions may pose challenges for organizations as well. Tools for defining CSS style definitions are available but the support for differing versions of CSS on different end-user devices may be varying. Use of XSL requires programming skills or applications providing graphical user interfaces for XSL. Although there are a few commercial products available for producing XSL from easy-to-use graphical interface, there is a need for tools allowing generic styling for XML documents to be defined. The generic styling may support multiple differing formatting outputs. This paper presents a possible solution for XML document formatting. XF (Extensible Formatting language) is a generic high-level formatting language serving as a mediator for contemporary, powerful formatting languages such as CSS and XSL. A prototype implementation of XF with an easyto-use visual interface is also described. XF is based on XML and bridges the gap between end-users and existing powerful formatting languages.