On 24 Dec 2007, 16:57, yawnmoth <terra1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> XSL stylesheets can be used to convert an XML file into whatever
> binary format you want (DocBook, for example, does PDF's).  My
> question is...  what if you wanted to go in the other direction?

2nd law of thermodynamics (wiki it) applies.
You can always "lose" information, but you can't re-generate it.

"Information" can mean content or structure equally well here. Turning
text in different XML elements into plain rendered text (such as a
bitmap or PDF) is "lossy", because you lose the knowledge of which
class of element it came from.

This applies to a "closed system", so sticking information or hints
back onto it from outside counts as "cheating" 8-)  It's also hard to
do, very hard if you're talking about a production-grade bulk system.


So, the upshot of all this is: keep your content in a semantically-
rich, structure-preserving format for as long as possible. Transform
it into "simple" presentation formats at the very last moment.
Investigate ways to keep the semantics intact, even when published to
these simple formats, e.g. HTML might lose the XMl element names in
favour of making everthing a <div>, but you can still preserve that
information by adding suitable class attributes.