RE: Semantic markup for NUANCED tabular data

["Bill Lawrence" <scribe -at- matrixplus -dot- com>]

> What I'm trying to get at is... in general... what would
> the markup have to look like such that it COULD be rendered
> automatically into the table format, with the option to get
> it into any other output form, as necessary?
> 
> Right now, in (say) FM, I've got a whole bunch of little
> paragraphs, tagged in such a way that FM makes a table.
> But that tagging gives little more than formatting info,
> and the physical order in which the paragraphs are encountered
> is critical to where/how they appear in the table.
> 
> Presumably, semantic-only markup would have to have enough
> info to differentiate... what?  My first thought is that
> most of the paragraphs would no longer exist. The actual text
> might need to be different, and then it would need to be
> packed with meta-data, in order to have an application
> generate all the rows of cells with appropriate words or
> symbols at each cell.
> 

I'm not sure what you're asking, so forgive me if this is off the mark.

I think you've gotten the mistaken idea that marking something as a text
object, such as a paragraph, isn't permissible.  Text objects are
objects too.  They can be lists of various types, block quotes,
sidebars, paragraphs, etc.  They are divorced from the actual
appearance, but not divorced from their function as a text object.

As for the table, remember that a table is an really not a text object
per se, even though it's composed of text.  It is really a visual object
like a figure.  However, let's presume that you really want to turn
parts of a table into something else.  In the XML table model with which
I'm most familiar, the CALS table model, you have objects within the
visual object which we call "a table."  These objects are rows, columns,
and cells (and they are comparable to your FM table tags).  Within each
of these you can have additional objects, some of which might be
paragraphs or bulleted lists and some of which might be anything else,
such as command line syntax elements (command, variable, constant,
required field, etc.)

Suppose I want to render some of the table objects in another way, such
as the answer components in a Q&A structure within a FAQ.  I can write
an XSLT script to find my table in an XML document (or "instance" as
it's often called).  I can find the table either by it's
parent/child/sibling relationship to something else (which I can
manipulate via XPATH), or through metadata (such as an ID attribute)
within the table.  Once I find the table, I can again use XPATH or
metadata to locate the data I'm looking for and assemble an entirely new
XML structure using that same data.  The new structure, because it's
dynamically generated from the old, updates automatically when I update
the data in the table.  So if I change the table, the next time I run my
transformation script the table is updated.

Now let's turn it around.  Suppose I want to build a table from other
things, such as data contained in other objects within other XML
instances.  It's really just the reverse of the same sort of script.
Because the documentation is really an XML database, I can find and
reuse data in any way I choose.

Does this answer your question?

Bill




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