Can a DTD map custom styles to standard HTML tags?

Question

Hi,
Every week the publishing house I work for has to manually copy the entire content of a weekly magazine on an article-by-article basis into an online database, the web version of the magazine. This means copying the styled InDesign content and inserting it into the database as plain text, re-finding all those italics (and any other styling) and putting it all back manually.
I already know that I can create tags with all the basic HTML styles needed in the 'Tags' palette in InDesign, and then export that.
The trouble is that when I re-import the XML file, I have to laboriously map the custom house-styles (there are many of them and they're boiler-plate, i.e. consistent, across all the magazine's InDesign styles) to the imported HTML styles.
So here's my question:
Am I wrong to believe that it's possible to create a DTD that would import not only the HTML tags but their relationship to the existing, custom-named InDesign tags that are common to all the magazine's documents?
As an InDesign wish-feature, what's missing from the 'Tags' corner-menu is 'Export DTD' - if that was available, I could map the whole relationship between Indesign Styles/HTML styles just one time and later import the DTD on other articles; which would tell the Structure View how to convert our custom house-styles (both Paragraph Styles and Character Styles) into HTML tags and cut this time-consuming task in half.
Thanks!
EDIT: I perhaps should have mentioned that obviously the final stage after this 'dream conversion' is to export the XML from the Structure View. Then I can just open the saved XML file and paste it into the CMS with formatting intact.
Added extra explanation of the workflow.

Answer 1

geekbelief wrote:
Googling XSLT and InDesign, it seems that such a stylesheet, if I were to create it, possibly couldn't handle spaces in the original InDesign style-names..? If anyone knows that for a fact, I'd be glad to be aware of it before starting down a long path to a roadblock.
That's a good question. Let's find out together, shall we. I just created a text frame with Lorem Ipsum text, and created "a style" (with space) and "bstyle" (without). Now ... Map Style to Tag doesn't work, presumably because the tags don't exist and I assumed this would *create* them. And if you create one, ID complains "tags cannot contain tabs or spaces". (So can you have a Tab in your paragraph style name then? Gosh.)
... Forcing in a Non-breaking Space (#160) also doesn't work, this time ID simply says "A tag name cannot contain the character ' '."
I think that's one you have to do manually.
geekbelief wrote:
I'm guessing that if I wanted to change the InDesign style 'Subheader' into 'h2', that snippet of the XSLT would be like this...?
<xsl:template match="Subheader"><h2><xsl:apply-templates /></h2></xsl:template>
Yeah, that's the correct syntax. But you cannot use an XSLT for mapping InDesign styles to tags. The process as I described works when importing your XML into InDesign, and changes the tags in the XML file to match InDesign styles. That's the other way around.
I don't expect anyone to write this for me, but any hints or links to tutes that I haven't yet found would be appreciated!
For a simple one-to-one translation of tag names, you can use this all the way. You only need any other XSL command if you want to do more than simple translation, such as filtering, moving, combining, or separating tags or their contents.
There are lots of good tutes on the 'web for XSLT, although it seems interest has diminished lately. Half a decade ago XSLT was "hot"; nowadays the iPad is. Is there any news on improvements for ID's native XSLT support in CS6? I dare bet there are none at all -- it's already been deemed "yesterday's technology" by Adobe's Dev Team, just as Flash was discarded per CS5.5. I'm sure next year DPS will follow; and the year after that EPubs will be gone for good as well, replaced by holograms, transmitted live from your local library.