XML as a Web Content Tool
The CIA World Fact Book
ATLIS Custom Publishing Application
The CIA Factbook is a well-known, publicly available database on the CIA's web site. To create ATLIS's custom publishing application we downloaded the HTML files from the CIA site and then converted them to well-formed XML. The result was one XML file per country. We further processed the files to break each XML file into a separate file for each section of the data. This resulted in several files for each country. A DTD was developed for the simplified data, and all the files were then parsed and validated.
The next step was to create a composition specification for the data. A typesetting specification was developed to process the XML, create the pages selected by the user, and return the composed pages as a PDF in a browser window.
We then developed a "front-end" application to control the typesetting. Using a combination of HTML and JavaScript, a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) was created to run under Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) using the ISAPI protocol. When the user presses the "print" button, their information is passed back to the web server using the Post method. This information is transferred to the DLL and where it is processed and extracted to create a composition file for our composition engine (TeX).
The composition file contains a set of include lines telling TeX which XML files to include in the resulting PDF. Then the DLL executes TeX as a sub-process to compose the PDF file. Finally, the DLL then streams the resulting PDF back to the user's browser window where it will be displayed via a PDF plug-in.