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Subject:RE: Converting to text From:Jason Willebeek-LeMair <jlemair -at- cisco -dot- com> To:Mark Baker <mbaker -at- omnimark -dot- com>, Jason Willebeek-LeMair <jlemair -at- cisco -dot- com>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:46:13 -0600
<snippety/>
>You can't do RTF to XML (or anything else to XML) with XSLT.
Hmmm. Then this article about converting HTML to XML using XSLT
(microsoft or xml.com site, I do not remember which) must be wrong...
For converting legacy documentation, Omnimark may be the ticket, or it
may not. For HTML, it is probably a little much (at least, according to
this article). For Framemaker docs, you should look into the XML export
function of Frame. For Word, it sounds like Omnimark fits the bill.
>XSLT has many weaknesses, and no advantages over Perl,
>Python, OmniMark, Java, or just about any other full
>programming language that either has a parser built in
>(as does OmniMark) or can interface to a parser.
Again, not exactly true.
One advantage is that you do not have to learn another &%^#ing
programming/scripting language.
As an XML newbie, it took me exactly one day to write several XSLTs that
converted the same source to RTF, HTML, and MML. Not bad, considering
that I also had to create the XML markup and figure out the target
markup languages. There are still a few bugs to work out of the RTF and
MML--mostly to do with tables (and with the fact that my knowledge of
those two formats comes from saving existing files to those formats and
viewing the output in Notepad)--but the HTML is fully formatted.
