Structure inDesign document and export as XML for use in the web

Question

Hello everyone,
I just recently started using inDesign and I am fascinated by its possibilities! I use it for a project where a finished inDesign layout that is used for a printed publication is now supposed to be transformed for implementing it on a web site. My job is to export the inDesign document as an XML file. After massive reading the last weeks I'm quite familiar with the structuring and tagging in inDesign. Though there's some issues I do not understand. Your precious advice would be of highest meaning to me
The programmer who will later use my XML output for the web-transformation needs the document structured in different levels like "Root > Chapter > Subchapter > Text passage / table". I already structured the document with tags like title, text passage, table, infobox,... but the structure is just linear, putting one item following to another.
How can I structure the document with reoccuring tags that enable me to identify the exact position of an item in the document's structure? So that I can say for example "text passage X" is located in chapter 4, subchapter 1. This has to be done because the document is supposed to be updated later on. So maybe a chapter gets modified and has to be replaced, but this replacement is supposed to be displayed.
I hope my problem becomes clear! That's my biggest issue for now. So for any help I'd be very thankful!

Answer 1

Our print publications are created in InDesign CS5 for Mac then the text is exported to RTF files then sent to an outside company to be converted to our XML specifications for use by our website developers.  I would like to create a workflow in which our XML tags are included in the InDesign layouts and then export the XML from the layouts.
Some more detail about what kind of formatting is necessary might be helpful.
I know that IDML files contain the entire layout in XML format.  Is it a good idea to extract what we need from IDML, using the already-assigned tags?
Well, if you want to export the whole document, it's the only reasonable approach.
We use a workflow system such that each story is a seperate InCopy document, stored in ICML format (Basically a subset of IDML). Our web automation uses XSLT to convert each story into HTML for use on our web site; it also matches it up with external metadata so it knows what is a headline and what is not, etc.. It is not exactly hassle free, and every once in a while someone uses a new InDesign feature that breaks things (e.g., our XSLT has no support for paragraph numbering, so numbered paragraphs show up without their numbers).
You could do the same thing with with IDML, you'd just have to pick out each story, but that's small potatoes compared to all the XSL work you're going to have to do.
On the other hand, there may be better approaches if you're not going to export the whole document. For instance,  you could use scripting to export each story as an RTF file, and then you could convert the RTF files into HTML using other tools.