Multiple platform authoring tool

Abstract

Any company, which publishes material, has to rely on three main groups of people, the content developer, the layout designers and the web programmers who format the content according to the designer's proposals. This has obvious disadvantages when considering that the programmer is involved for the sake of formatting content whenever this changes. Apart from this, with the flourishing of different technologies and standards, the programmers must constantly update their skills to cater for new media. With the emergence of technologies such as XML (eXstensible Markup Language) and other related technologies such as XSL (eXstensible Stylesheet Language), this shortfall can be partially overcome. This thesis aims to produce a simple, intuitive program that accepts XML formatted data as input and produce guided transformations to other formats. Although the process requires partial human intervention, it must be simple enough for non-technical people to use. The program will eventually produce several XSL transformations of the document for different formats. All the documents can be previewed beforehand and arranged using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. Apart from these features, the program is designed to allow easy upgrades with the emergence of new standards or technologies by means of plug-ins.