One key aspect of teiJournal will be the ability of the editor to configure as much as possible of the presentation information through a user-friendly interface. There is so much to configure that the key problem is going to be organization and storage of this information. One way to think of this is as "style blocks", each of which controls a particular aspect of a particular presentation format.

Typical blocks would be: the default format of bibliographical info (Chicago?), layout of each format (e.g. running titles), the content of each format, and the abstracted and user-configurable aspects of each output type (font, style, page size and other choices, especially for PDF).

Style block code will find its way into two kinds of output: XSL:FO (for PDF), in which it will be inserted inline, and CSS, where it will control the display of predefined XHTML classes. The most convenient way to store this information will be as XSL Attribute Sets. Since these are XML, they can be stored directly into the database, and read easily. The data itself is going to be a combination of CSS and XSL:FO attributes and values; we need to come up with a template-based GUI for editing it.

Finally, there will be some types of style choice that do not translate into CSS or XSL attributes. For instance, the choice of MLA or Chicago formatting for bibliographies or references will be a choice between two blocks of rendering code. There may not be many of these.

Including time spent working this out so far.