Re: External cross-refs in XML

[markb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

>> > Is it feasible to create *external* cross-refs while in FM,
>> > that are exported to XML elements and attributes, and then
>> > correctly re-translated to the same working cross-refs
>> > when the XML file is opened later? No book file is used in
>> > FM, and .fm is not the storage format.
>>
>> Not as far as I know :(
>
> Thanks... bad news :(
> Maybe I'm missing something here, but how come external links
> are so easy to do with HTML, but seems impossible in XML?
> Or is this solved with XPointer/XLink or whatever it's called?
> It's really such an obvious feature of any document set,
> regardless of format...
>

Indeed. There are a couple of things that exist in the internal
Frame-to-HTML export that would be very useful to have access to in XML
export for those of us too lazy or too dim to write code for the FDK.

First is cross-references, where as you say the default Frame-to-HTML
behaviour is obvious (though not always the right thing to do) and can be
very hard to recreate from the XML output.

The second is the refusal of Frame to output values for attributes defined
as UniqueIDs to XML (whether they are optional or mandatory), compared
with its insistence on writing unique IDs for every element in its
internal HTML-export.

> BTW, I cannot even get *internal* links (cross-refs) to round-trip
> between XML and FM. Sigh...
>

I'm slightly sure this isn't too hard, but haven't done any round-tripping
in an age, so can't recall the details.

Mark Barratt


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