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 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.