Some kind of XML
Posted: 2010-05-15 06:22:07
I've been hearing for years about XML, have understood its usefulness but have never actually found a way of using it for my own work.
I note that most of the web sites which discuss using XML for writing are oriented towards technical writers. Although I'm technically literate, most of my writing is in no way technical; it seems to me possible that one could use XML to write poetry. One should certainly be able to use it to write structured general-interest essays in English and/or French, which is my main activity at the moment.
Here's an example of something I'd like to do, and which I think could be solved by XML, or something similar. I would be most grateful for any pointers to how I could proceed.
I keep a daily diary, which is in a single very long Nisus Pro file. I use basic style sheets to nest titles, which include years, months and days - the latter formatted automatically via the "Insert date & time" menu item.
As is the nature of such projects, my document contains text on a variety of subjects. These include menus (food), moods, health issues, who's coming to dinner, films or plays we've seen, music, or natural history observations.
I would like to turn this into a structured document in such a way that I could, for example, export or isolate all the observations about natural history, or about dinner menus.
I could create my own nested tags - for example <nature><birds></birds><trees></trees></nature>, or <guests><dinner></dinner></guests>, and create key bindings to type them automatically. I guess I could also use stylesheets to do the same thing.
I know more or less what I want to do, but I have absolutely no idea where to start. As I might later want to generalise my use of XML across all my documents, I don't want to spend weeks exploring some particular avenue only to discover that it's not what I need.
Any ideas? Is anyone using Nisus software to do this kind of thing?
I note that most of the web sites which discuss using XML for writing are oriented towards technical writers. Although I'm technically literate, most of my writing is in no way technical; it seems to me possible that one could use XML to write poetry. One should certainly be able to use it to write structured general-interest essays in English and/or French, which is my main activity at the moment.
Here's an example of something I'd like to do, and which I think could be solved by XML, or something similar. I would be most grateful for any pointers to how I could proceed.
I keep a daily diary, which is in a single very long Nisus Pro file. I use basic style sheets to nest titles, which include years, months and days - the latter formatted automatically via the "Insert date & time" menu item.
As is the nature of such projects, my document contains text on a variety of subjects. These include menus (food), moods, health issues, who's coming to dinner, films or plays we've seen, music, or natural history observations.
I would like to turn this into a structured document in such a way that I could, for example, export or isolate all the observations about natural history, or about dinner menus.
I could create my own nested tags - for example <nature><birds></birds><trees></trees></nature>, or <guests><dinner></dinner></guests>, and create key bindings to type them automatically. I guess I could also use stylesheets to do the same thing.
I know more or less what I want to do, but I have absolutely no idea where to start. As I might later want to generalise my use of XML across all my documents, I don't want to spend weeks exploring some particular avenue only to discover that it's not what I need.
Any ideas? Is anyone using Nisus software to do this kind of thing?