While this is how mature publishing systems handle content, most Web publishing does not work in this manner. Rather, content owners and HTML writers are often doing each other's jobs. People using regular text editors generally perform this part of the cycle, though some XML-aware text editors are available and make the process a bit easier. Some vendors are enabling their databases to produce XML data directly out of select statements. Next, the XML file is processed.
Any intermediate logic is applied here.
This step may be eliminated depending on how Step 1 was performed. We'll look at an example of XML processing when we discuss the Cocoon Project. The document generated in Step 2 is now rendered by applying an XSL style sheet to it. Specific formatting is applied, resulting in a document applicable to the requesting client. Actual implementations of such a framework are at the very early stages of development.