TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
There may not be any beast that creates markup fragments, but why should
that stop you? I don't see how you can get the benefit of validation
unless you are validly writing to a DTD - hence the need for something
the application considers a complete document. You could take one of
two approaches, or a combination of the two...
Create a custom DTD that represents only the fragment you need... Make
<body> the root element, and specify everything within it. You could
probably modify your existing DTD rather easily to pull out the parents
of <body>. As you edit the "fragment" using that DTD makes the
application think it's a complete document.
Use the full DTD, but modify the SGML export/import. Believe me, every
WYSIWYG editor, in one way or another, transforms the the markup
representation into a binary representation - either in memory (typical
for browsers), in a temp file (ArborText???), or in a "native format"
file (FrameMaker+SGML, for example). Use the product's API to catch
that process, and on Save, only save the fragment you want - on Open,
wrap the fragment in a template of parent structure.
I don't think this is unusual... I have participated in projects that
managed fragments, and assembled them in books. Your biggest issue will
be finding a WYSIWYG system that generates truly unique IDREFS for all
these fragments - you will need to keep a database of serial numbers, or
some such thing. That's where a Doc Management product enters into the
picture...
Cheers cud
--
Chris Despopoulos, maker of CudSpan Freeware...
Plugins to Enhance FrameMaker & FrameMaker+SGML
My URL and address have both changed - please use: http://www.telecable.es/personales/cud/
cud -at- telecable -dot- es
*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
Build Contents, Indexes, and Search for Web Sites and Help Systems
Available 4/30/01 at http://www.devahelp.com or info -at- devahelp -dot- com
Sponsored by DigiPub Solutions Corp, producers of PDF 2001 Conference East,
June 4-6, Baltimore, MD. Now covering Acrobat 5. Early registration deadline
April 27. http://www.pdfconference.com.
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
