How did I do it
- Technologies
- Document Structure

The task in my third school assignment was to design a schema for an XML document, and create an XSLT transformation which would convert the document into a presentation.

How did I do it

Here are some key features and technologies I used to create the final schema and transformation.

Technologies

Schema

To create the schema for the XML document I used Relax NG Compact, which is stored in and schema.rnc file. I linked it to the final document using this line of code:

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<?xml-model href="schema.rnc" type="application/relax-ng-compact-syntax"?>

Here is an example of how might the schema look like:

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start =
    element presentation{
        element slide {

            element header {
                element title {
                    styled_text
                }?,
                element subtitle {
                    styled_text
                }?
            },

            element body {
                element content {
                    attribute type {"text" | "image"},
                    styled_text
                }+
            }
        }+
    }

I preffered the Compact syntax over traditional Relax NG for the easy and speed of writing using it. To validate my documents I used pyjing, which is a Python wrapper around the Jing Java Relax NG validator.

Transformation

For the transformation of the XML into the final format, I used XSLT 2.0. The second version allows to create multiple final documents from a single XML file, which was very welcomed when creating this presentation. That however meant that I wasn’t able to use xsltproc to transform the XML into the desired output, since xsltproc only supports XML 1.0. Because of that I had to use saxon for my transformation.

Styling

For the visual side of the presentation Bootstrap was used.

Document Structure

Basic structure

The root element of the document is <presentation/>. It then contains individual <slide/> components, which are split into two parts <header/> and <body/>. The header can contain a <title/> and <subtitle/> elements, which can be styled using inline elements, which will be mentioned later. The body can contain multiple <content/> elements, which can be of 3 different types:

text - this is your basic text, possibly styled using different other inline elements
image - this should be an URL or address of an image, which you wish to display.
video - a URL of an embedded video.

If there is only one <content/> element, it will be stretched across the whole slide. Otherwise, the elements will be organised into 2 columns.

Style elements

These are all the elements, which can be used to style text on the slides:

<bold/> - Creates bold text
<italic/> - Creates italic text
<underscore/> - Creates underscored text
<code/> - Marks text as code
<para/> - Organises text into a paragraph, taking whitespaces and newlines into account
<list/> and <ordered-list/> - Creates either an unordered or ordered-list of <item/> elements
<item/> - Single list item
<link/> - Contains 2 attributes: type and href. Type can be either ext (href=external URL link) or slide (href=position of a slide), which will link either to a website or another slide.

All of these elements can be also nested into each other to achieve the desired look.

Parameters

The transformation .xsl file contains the following parameters for configuration:

text-font-size - the font size of all <content/> elements of type="text" in pixels.
title-font-size- the font size of the title in pixels.
subtitle-font-size- the font size of the subtitle in pixels.
background-color - the background color for all the slides, either as a word or a specific value.

Web Publishing 3rd Assignment