Templates that create useful semantis

Has anyone managed to create a template that creates robust semantics within blocks of prose (paragraphs)? It seems to me that templating does a good job of HTML-like markup but I find that totally uninteresting.

A good example of what I mean is New Industry Text Format (http://www.NITF.org) which is a sematically rich markup format. Geared for News gathering organizations, it captures all sorts of information in a semantically interesting way. An example of an NITF fragment would be:
Today, <org value="MSFT" idsrc="NASD">Microsoft</org>announced the release of....
That company is so big that they....

Some of that is HTML like but others are not. Some of the semantic structure (like postal address and location) have complex xml structures. I need to provide a way for a user to enter that sort of information without knowing NITF markup. It would have to show a dialog box that allows the user to edit the fragment, with drop downs for certain attributes and text fields for others. It also needs to be intelligent enough so that one could enter a postal address inline with the paragraph, It would be something like:
Send mail to me care of
<postaddr id="post1">
<addressee>
<person>
<name.given>Jim</name.given>
<name.family>Ross</name.family>
<function>CEO</function>
</person>
</addressee>
<delivery.point>1234 Nowhere Street 
RR 12</delivery.point>
<postalcode code-source="CanadaPost">X2X 2X2</postalcode>
<delivery.office code-source="CanadaPost" office-code="yvr">Vancouver</delivery.office>
<region code-source="GeomaticsCanada" region-code="BC">British Columbia</region>
<country iso-cc="ca">Canada</country>
</postaddr>
and I will reply as soot as I am able.

What I'm looking to do is highly complex semantics in such a way that my users don't have to know anything about the underlying markup.

I'm not going to be doing NITF, but its a good litmus test. My likely short term needs are for links to internal files and services that the user cannot know the URL for. I need to give them a list of files that they can choose from.

Any ideas?

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Comments

Migrateduser

Sorry if this does not directly address what you are looking for, but I just want to make sure you know that templating != html. It can be used for that (and in most cases is), but you are in no way limited to html output.

I believe that what you are attempting to do is technically possible with the templating engine. A lot of people misconstrue the datacapture with the end all and be all of templating. The presentation layer is quite powerful and extensible. (if you can write your processing in perl or as a module that can be called from iw_system the limits of what it can do are left up to your imagination and the resource limits of the hardware you are running on).

The presentation engine has been used to produce much more than html for some time. Say relatively complex pdf documents or postscript based on the data input into a dcr. The input however is not just limited to dcr's as you can bring in just about any other sort of data if you know enough perl (or some other language). Its just not there for you out of the box.

The problem that most people run into is the separation of datacapture from presentation. The users inputting the data are usually very visual oriented. (hense things like visual format).

I would suggest that you take a look at the FAQ and documentation available for the presentation engine:

http://support.interwoven.com/library/devel/tst/pt/

There is also a lot of ideas in the knowledge base on the support site that shows the sort of things that can be done with the templating engine beyond just strait html.