Poem Publishers, Inc. is an imaginary company for illustrating the use of XML-documents in organizational setting. Poem Publishers, Inc. publishes poems on Internet, and later on might start to publish poems as printed books or develope a SMS service. So far, this demonstration consists of the tasks company takes for getting the poems from authors in XML format and for making different kinds of poems and different kinds of collections of poems in Internet. We discuss the reasons for this within Parts 3 and 4 where we discuss the transformations and what was learned in a more detailed way.
When the poems written and marked up by the authors arrive to Poem Publishers, Inc, they are transformed into the XML-structure that is easier to process within the IIS 5.0 server using XSLT language and DOM interface as the techniques for document transformation. For example, the document encoding has to be fixed because there might be needs for string manipulation, and the figure entity definitions are taken out and only figure file names used for identifying figures within the poems.
The poems are published using two markup languages: XHTML and HTML
languages. In the demonstration we however do not provide all the
transformations in these both languages. There are different examples that output HTML and different examples that output XHTML.
It is my belief that in future the output format should always
be XHTML (basic). The difference with XHTML and HTML is that XHTML
language is defined by XML and thus can be seen as XML application/
XML-based language. HTML is defined by SGML and thus can be seen
as SGML application. Since XML is easier to parse (because it does not
allow leaving out either start of end tag, and is also case-sensitive)
it is expected that many end-user devices in the future use
XHTML instead of, for example WML or HTML. XHTML basic is a
subset of XHTML tag collection intented to be used in
devices that have limited ability to process data very fast
(connection limitations) or does not have ability to very sophisticated
layout rendering (such as mobile phones or PDA-devices).
Since there are still browres that do not support XHTML or support
it only as with the root element html, not xml, there are still some
transformations to HTML in this demonstration. In real life, one would
need to use for example a tool such as ISAPI filter (by Microsoft) or
write a code for detecting the type/version of end user browser that
is used for requesting a poem, and then perform transformation
(from xml-to-html or from xml-to-xhtml or from xml-to-wml) according to the browser the end-user uses for browsing the poems.
For publishing poems in Internet the Poem Publishers, Inc. need
also to add a header into each poem so that the publisher information
would be dynamically attaced into individual poems when published/
browsed in Internet by end users. For writing the
contact information of Poem Publishers, Inc. as a header or
footer of poems both in Finnish and English, the Poem Publishers,
Inc. has designed a DTD called pubinfo.dtd. With this DTD, they
can write header, footer of contact information of their company
as a separate files, which are then dynamically added to poems
or other documents when needed.
Also, the Poem Publishers, Inc. need to dynamically construct
hypertext link indexes of a poems belonging to a certain
poem collections. The poems belonging to a collection are also
concennated from multiple poem files into one file for
print publishing purposes realized later on.
For defining which poems should belong into a collection Poem Publishers, Inc. has a DTD for defining names and filenames of poems that are to be included into a collection, and for writing a name and id information pertaining the collection. For writing collection definition files in XML format they use a DTD prepared for this purpose. The DTD is called as poemcollection.dtd.
For styling the poems that are to be shown on the screen Poem Publishers use a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) definition called as poem_htm.css for XHTML and HTML formatted (transformation output)files. They also use a poem.css for browsing poems themselves as author-formatted XML files.
See the transformations and style rendering testing phases of Poem Publishers, Inc. in Part 3. The conclusions and what was learned is documented in Part 4.
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