XML active transformation (eXAcT): transforming documents within interactive systems

Stylesheets and batch transformations are the most widely used techniques to transform "abstract" documents into target presentation documents. Despite the recent introduction of incremental transformations, several important features required by interactive systems are yet to be addressed, such as multiple sources (e.g. preferences and resources), multiple targets (e.g. multiple views), source-to-target linking (e.g. interacting with the source via the tar-get), and bidirectional linking (e.g. interacting directly with the target). This paper proposes the use of XML Active Transformations (eXAcT) in order to fulfil these requirements. The eXAcT specification is based on the definition of two new DOM node types, active fragment and anchor, and on a transformation process in-spired from XSLT. Our jaXAT implementation toolkit allows the active transformation of any DOM document into (but not limited to) SVG presentations.