How to use InDesign as an XML "Skin"

If you have a number of XML documents, all based on the same tags, you can make them look completely different just by using a different style mapping and page layout. The following excerpt from XML Publishing with Adobe InDesign will show you how.

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The power of this technique is only beginning to be appreciated. It is held back by the fact that there is so little standardization of XML that people use in InDesign. I expect that the next development will be the introduction of XML standard tag sets (DTDs) for publications that are rich enough to describe information usefully, but not so deep that they are difficult to use. Eventually, there will be methods to create, tag and flow XML content into InDesign that are seamless compared to the state of the art when CS5 was released.

If you want to explore this concept now, it is easy to try out.

• First create an IDD template with styles, column layout, etc. that you like.
  
  
• Use an XML file as the basis to create placeholder content with the tags you want to use. The map the tags to styles in the template.
  
  
• Save a copy of the .indt file with a new name.
  
  
• Open it and redefine the styles, change the column layout, etc. to make a different looking design.
  
  
• Import XML into an IDD file based on the first template. It should format itself with your styles.
  
  
• Import the same XML, or other XML based on the same tags, into an IDD file based on your second template, It should format itself with your styles.

If you maintain the same set of XML tags and IDD styles and the mappings between them, you can create as many different document looks as you care to design. As a designer, you can look at this in a similar manner to creating HTML skins for web sites. You can commoditize the template design if you can get people to use the same XML tags for different content (or convert XHTML to XML using XSLT.)