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I've been exploring other worlds for a while. Somehow I find myself gravitating back to Symphony, albeit with a few more ideas. I stumbled across an editor built with Node.js called Texture from Substance. The source code for Texture is available on GitHub.

If anyone needs to support a JATS XML editor for the production of scientific content, this project is worth exploring. The data store is flat XML files. It would be interesting to somehow merge Symphony and Texture into a document production tool. If you combine that with what the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation is doing, you would have a platform for creating and managing a complete publishing production workflow using a decoupled architecture.

With XSLT 2.0, they are creating tools to parse Word documents (DOCX) into XHTML5 while trying to preserve the intended semantic structure of the document. They are building a suite of tools to build a pipeline process for transforming poorly formed XML into something usable for publishing to web, ePub, PDF, and print.

I am imagining a future for the Symphony approach by expanding the community to content management that combines the best of JavaScript, XML and XSLT.

Further Reading

@bauhouse thanks for the interesting input! Escpecially XSLT3 sounds really interesting. Since Symphony is still based on XSLT1, I wonder if there are any implementations of XSLT3 that could possibly be incorporated in Symphony?

Lea Verou’s CSS Secrets has also been created with HTML+CSS by the way. She mentioned somewhere it was a rather painful process since the rendering-engine had to be extended an debugged together with the developers all the time …

I believe XSLT 3.0 would require an investment in a license for the Saxon Enterprise Edition (EE) or Professional Edition (PE). For XSLT 2.0 support, there is an open source option available as Saxon Client Edition (CE) for XSLT 2.0 in the browser or Home Edition (HE/C) for the C/C++/PHP platforms.

Thanks for that note. I went looking for the method that Lea Verou used to create CSS Secrets and found the description of the HTML+CSS book creation process in the book preview. They used the HTMLBook standard using O'Reilly Atlas.

Ah, thanks for digging that out :) I thought she was using prince.

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Symphony • Open Source XSLT CMS

Server Requirements

  • PHP 5.3-5.6 or 7.0-7.3
  • PHP's LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled (--with-xsl)
  • MySQL 5.5 or above
  • An Apache or Litespeed webserver
  • Apache's mod_rewrite module or equivalent

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