Via Håvard Eide, who has a talent for getting the scoop on what’s new in PHP, (his PHP5 tutorial was the first online publication to take a close look at PHP5s new syntax): PDML: Portable Document Markup Language.
As it says on the cover;
PDML is an informal markup language written in 100% PHP, allowing to create complex PDF documents very easily for people already familiar with HTML. People familiar with PHP can also use it as a way to define templates for dynamic PDF documents.
A very cool idea and great to see effort going into this kind of project in PHP.
There’s a longer blog related to this subject, which is slowly brewing. When it comes to documents, have a hunch there’s too much emphasis on specific markups (e.g. docbook, html, rtf or whatever). Instead, by identifying the common “human intent” behind document markup, think it’s possible to define a set of “rules” which could be used as the basic of a framework that’s capable of transforming documents of any format to documents of any format (given parsers / generators).
Many of the basic rules have already been “captured” by PEAR::Text_Wiki. Might even work nicely with the filters Håvard commented on here.
Anyway – more some other time.
