Patent ID: 7703009

Claim:
A method in a computing system for generating an extensible stylesheet, comprising: accessing a distinguished target document in a target markup language, the distinguished target document containing static data items and specifying display characteristics for at least a portion of the contained static data items; accessing a document type definition structure that establishes a hierarchical relationship among a set of multiple dynamic documents elements by specifying, for each of the set of dynamic document elements, a path identifying a position of the dynamic document element in the hierarchical relationship, wherein a distinguished source document that (1) is in a source markup language that is compliant with the document type definition structure and (2) specifies instance data for at least a portion of the set of dynamic document elements is to be transformed into the distinguished target document by applying the generated extensible stylesheet to the distinguished source document; for each of a plurality of selected static data items among the static data items contained by the distinguished target document, identifying a corresponding dynamic document element in the accessed document type definition structure's set of dynamic document elements such that the selected static data item is an instance of the corresponding dynamic document element; for each of the plurality of selected static data items, replacing the selected static data item in the distinguished target document with a reference to the identified corresponding dynamic document element, the reference containing the path specified for the identified corresponding dynamic document element by the document type definition structure; after the replacing, generating the extensible stylesheet from the distinguished target document such that the extensible stylesheet contains the references to the corresponding dynamic document elements, and such that the extensible stylesheet specifies for each reference to an identified dynamic document element any display characteristics specified by the distinguished target document for the static data item corresponding to the dynamic document element; simultaneously displaying the distinguished target document and the document type definition structure, and wherein, for each selected static data item, a corresponding dynamic document element is identified by receiving user input specifying a correspondence between the selected static data item and the corresponding dynamic document element, wherein, for each selected static data item, the received user input is user input dragging one of the selected static data item and the corresponding dynamic document element to the other of the selected static data item and the corresponding dynamic document element.