Creating a first xml workflow for poetry books

Hi Tonaya,

Sure, could you provide some more details about what you're trying to accomplish with your XML workflow for poetry content? You mention that you're coding the content for your designers; are they expecting a specific flavor of XML? DocBook XML (http://www.docbook.org/) is one vocabulary used quite frequently for representing book content, but the markup is specialized for technical book content and may not be ideal for marking up poetry. Another option might be XLDL (http://www.ister.org/code/xldl/), which is geared more toward literature and poetry, with tags like <line> and <stanza>.

In terms of a WYSIWYG editor for XML content, I might suggest you use XMLmind XML Editor (http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/) instead of oXygen, as the interface is a bit more user-friendly and more similar to standard word processing apps like Microsoft Word. It should be possible to copy and paste content from Microsoft Word into XMLmind without too much difficulty. Both XMLMind and oXygen have built-in DTD support, which will automatically enforce the validity rules of the specific XML vocabulary you're using.

Hope this helps,
Sanders

Thank you so much--this is really helpful!

So, I was able to open and view that literary schema in Oxygen--super exciting!!

If you don't mind bearing with a complete novice, what would the next step be to open a new xml document for a book manuscript using that schema, and then where would the text of the ms. go? I'm guessing between the "title" elements?

Oxygen has an author view meant for people like me, but it's looking for a css stylesheet to use for this, and either there isn't one or else I'm doing something wrong.

And another question--if there are ampersands in the document, do I need to replace them all to get them to work?

I hope you are getting some great extra credit points for helping me out, in addition to my extremely deep gratitude!!

Hey there,

I saw you post about poetry and xml schemas, so I thought I'd ask about your work. I am a poet and visual artist, but I have many friends in the open data world where xml is pretty hot. So some of that has rubbed off on me. I am in the process of putting some of my own work into an xml compliant format, but I would be very interested in knowing your interest in the subject. Feel free to email me directly at: knappjerome@gmail.com

take care,
Jerome