Ok, so I've been using Lyx for about a year now. I haven't really dug too deep in to the LaTex/Tex side of things.
I've a little more experience with XML + XSLT.
It has a nice seperation of Data from Presentation.
(you could even say of Model from View).
Lets say I have some information relating to a Timeline.
In XML I would write:
<timeline title="Australian History>
<timepoint year="60000BC" event="Aboriginal Migration">Aboriginal Australians are believed to have first arrived on the Australian mainland by boat from the Indonesian archipelago.</timepoint>
<timepoint year="1606" event="First European Landing"> The first uncontested landing in Australia by Europeans was by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon </timepoint>
<timepoint year="1770" event="British Claim"> James Cook charted the East Coast of Australia[1] for Britain and returned with accounts favouring colonisation at Botany Bay (now in Sydney). </timepoint>
<timepoint year="1788" event="First Fleet Arrival"> A First Fleet of British ships arrived at Botany Bay in January, to establish a penal colony. </timepoint>
<timepoint year="1901" event="Federation"> The Commonwealth of Australia came into being when the Federal Constitution was proclaimed by the Governor General, Lord Hopetoun, on the 1st of January.</timepoint>
</timeline>
(Datasource for above example).
And then I would write a XSL transformation to make this into some nice human readable form.
Perhaps a petty SVG diagram, or a website with suitable formatting.
Is there a similar notion of seperating content from formatting in Latex? (that i could then embeed into Lyx).
I thought one of the LaTex motto's was "Sort out the content, let the system take care of the formatting." (or something to that effect).
I've envisioning if nothing else then a XSLT could be written to transform the XML into Tex, and then that Tex could be Included. (and this exectution of the XSLT could be done each time the Lyx/Tex is exported).
But that is ugly.
The must be a nicer way of using some form of Extensiable Markup in Tex.
Best Answer
LaTeX already separates content from formatting. E.g. the look of
\section{ABC}
can be different depending on packages and classes. It is also easy to translate your XML-example in something more LaTeX-like e.g.Now you only need to write sensible definitions to get a suitable formatting.
The main difference between the markup from LaTeX and XML is that the first is less strict – and so better suited for normal, more or less messy human documents, where not everything can be pressed in the XML-model.