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Creating and Using XML-Based Internal Documents?
Richard Emberson asks: "Once again into the breech...or at least the ground floor in a new startup. This time around, I would like to have all of the Engineering
documentation internally online: a unified, internal, CVS-ed, web-based, development organization document tree covering the engineering process, methodology, coding standards, nightly build/test reports, FAQs, new hire information and help pages and the documentation for each project.
Recently I've written documentation (on Linux of course) using the Apache XML-stylebook tags, stylesheets, and Ant-base publishing - and I like it.
So my questions are: Has anyone done this and, if so, how were the links between documents managed?" Does your workplace use XML in its internal documentation? If so, how well does your system work, and what advice would you pass on to anyone else attempting something similar?
"If you start out with only one project (product), how do you structure it so that when new projects come into existence they can easily be integrated? Are there documentation templates out there upon which I can base the various development documents (like requirements, product development plan, design, coding walk-thru standards, etc.) and not have any of this swell too be so large that no one will be able to produce, maintain or read it?"
Don't know if you'd consider it engineering texts, but XML is used in moving metadata from pictures around. There's an open source and binaries downloadable.... might help your implementation.
:)
Good luck- it's quite impressive once you get the trees set up correctly
Standards are good. XML is good. Documentation should be in a standard format. Network traffic should be in a standard format. IPC traffic should be in a standard format. XML is good.
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Developers,Developers,Developers,Developers....
-teknopurge
http://techienews.utropicmedia.com help us beta!!!
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XML is a buzzword. A poor one at that. XML is no more compatible and no more universal that the concept of binary data.
XML is not a standard - rather it is the cumulation of marketing hype designed to lure inexperienced web developers into the trap of full buzz compliance (which normally comes with little real experience).
So in essence - when this guy says, "I want the companies data in XML" he may as well be saying that he wants the company's data in one of those newfangled "binary" files.
Can't slashdot do any better than this? The only reason I read anymore is for the trolls. The quality of their postings outweigh the quality of the stories they are attached to. That is a truely sad commentary on the slashdot community.
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
XML is a complement to HTML
XML is not a replacement for HTML.
It is important to understand that XML is not a replacement for HTML. In future Web development it is most likely that XML will be used to describe the data, while HTML will be used to format and display the same data.
My best description of XML is as a cross-platform, software and hardware independent tool for transmitting information
Document interchange with our customers had to be in WOrd, so thats what we got stuck with eventhough we initially started off in the direction you are heading.
Good luck taking on the Microsoft Monster.
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Why not use DocBook it is XML based extendable what more could you ask?
Have Fun
t00t TooT
I asked my closed-source vendor about ubiqitous computing.
He answered "Oh no! You-not-be-quit-us!"
It's "once more into the breech"
Breech? Did that guy mean "breach" or "breeches"? Personally, I'd prefer going once more into the breeches...
It sounds to me like you're already a step ahead of the rest of the world, for the most part.
My workplace uses a hodge-podge of formats including "special" ASCII text files, Framemaker, HTML and Microsoft Word. Needless to say, it's a mess. No open, standard, consistent tools to examine all of our documentation. Yeah, you can grep HTML, but the others are a pain. And don't even think about automatic script language based conversion among these formats.
I suspect you're more advanced in your thinking than 90% of the places out there. Why not continue with your thinking and let the rest of us know what you decide?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
they say that office will use XML, however, I doubt that they will use it as file formating as that would put a big leak in thier desktop domination.
:-p)
they will most likly us it for communicating between thier office applications.
of cource they don't tell you that in the press releases, they just say "Office will be moving to XML because we want to support standards" to bad they arn't using XML in a standard way (I know I will get flamed for that last part
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Have you considered zope? It is perfect for storing a document tree, it has strong support for XML, including an extension for DocBook and supposedly it integrates with Apache. Gives you also lots of options to format the
XML as Html.
I use stylebook for internal documents at planetu.com, but stylebook seems to be dead. Docbook is a much better choice. I just have not got around to converting to it.
The really nice thing about using XML is that I can automate some of the documents. Such as the list of valid form fields for a HTML/jsp page.
For the nightly builds, change logs and javadocs, I use Alexandria.
In your case I'd probably choose docbook, but if you're just looking for a way to automatically setup the links between several XML documents you might take a look at w3make (which I wrote) or a similar project called XWeb which was written by Peter Becker.
-- a blessed +42 regexp of confusion (weapon in hand) You hit. The format string crumbles and turns to dust
No joke. Start interviewing these information flow officers now. Learn what they can do for you. Getting a sharp young librarian into your business early can be the guide or gardener your jungle will need.
Don't associate librarians with "the library"; there's more of them in businesses than public/school libraries. These are specialists trained in information organization, retrieval, and distribution.
And, being a recession, you may find this investment quite affordable right now.
XML is a complement to HTML
XML is not a replacement for HTML.
I disagree rather strongly with this. I don't know what your experience is with XML but there are lots of shops that use XML for both presentation and data interchange because of its versatility. An XML document can be presented using an XSLT stylesheet or parsed using a DOM, SAX or whatever API. So the same document that can appear on a website because it has a stylesheet to transform it to HTML to maker it viewable is the same document that is used by your applications as a config file, data file, database updategram, etc. with zero modifications to the file.
This is a very, very powerful aspect of XML. In my opinion, HTML is dead and considering that there's been an XHTML Recommendation for close to two years I wonder why people are still clinging to XHTML (Yes, I know it's because the browser developers have dropped the ball).
It's called XSL and XSLT. Read up on it.
We standardized all our early documentation on XML, and it's been working great. Admittedly we're using Perforce, not CVS, but we're doing something very similar to what you want to do.
All our documentation is in XML format, in a DTD that we defined. We then have XSLT transformation scripts that convert that documentation to HTML format, and scripts that automatically update our development intranet whenever changes get checked in, along with scripts that invoke javadoc and doxygen on all the code to convert that to HTML format. We're in the process of being able to convert the same documents to PDF format to be able to publish those same documents, in the same formatting, to pretty-formatted documents for printing.
This, aside from the simplicity of not having to worry about formatting documentation when you write it, is pretty cool. It's easier for me (as an engineer) to write a very sparse, structured XML document that will end up looking very good on screen, than to learn enough HTML to make my documents look good. And it's easier for us to enforce a standard look and feel across all documentation this way, because only the XSL transforms have to change if we change our formatting.
But the real advantage is coming out with more advanced uses. For example, when we have configuration files, we have a special DTD that we define the documentation for the configuration files in, and then any documents that describe the configuration files are automatically converted both to the HTML documentation, AND to an example configuration file for users. We can also mark some things as only visible internally, so that the same document can have data that's visible to end-users, and data that's visible to employees (so if we have advanced configuration options that we don't want customers mucking with because they're for debugging the system, we can document them in the same place, and just hide them from customers but let our support and professional services people in on the secret).
The best part is that because our XML DTD is very structured, someone like me (an engineer), will actually use it because it ends up being easier for me than writing in plain text, whereas I wouldn't do it in HTML (or if I did, it would just look like crap). It also makes it much easier to do integrations across branches of code: because we know the DTD for our XML documents very well, it's more likely that integrations will go smoothly, which helps keeping multiple branches of code and docs in sync automatically. If you go with a binary format, you're not going to be able to do that, and every time you make a change, you're going to have to manually change the documentation for each and every branch. With ASCII or HTML, everybody's going to produce documents that look a little different, so you're not going to be able to have as easy a time in integrating between branches.
Our docs infrastructure person can pipe up in terms of the particular technology that we're using, but it's turned out to be one of the best infrastructure decisions that we (actually, she) made, and it's saved uncountable hours and actually made it more likely that people will write documentation themselves, because they don't have to pull out some crazy windows tool: just edit the document in emacs, and it'll still look pretty for the customers.
Unless you are the CTO or the only developer in your company, you may not have complete control over the documentation format. Other people may, and probably will prefer to write documentation in Word than in XML. And I won't condemn them because Word is a good editor for documentations in plain English.
A way to introduce XML-based documentation in a company is to prove what it can do (and not just speak about it). In a previous company, I expressed the desire to have a documentation generated from the source code, but nobody seemed really interested. So I did it myself, and when they saw it, they loved it.
The idea was to parse our source files (which were in various languages, more or less easy to parse) and generate an XML documentation for the APIs. In a second step, other programs read the XML documentation and transformed it in RTF (Word) and HTML, using SAX and XSLT (I tried both and preferred SAX).
The HTML version was installed on the Intranet and the developers used it as a reference documentation in their everyday work. They knew they could trust it more than any other documentation, because it was regenerated every night. They also liked it because, unlike Javadoc, the source code parser worked very hard to gather information from the code without forcing the programmer to use constraining comment conventions.
The Word version was delivered to the clients as an API documentation.
Other documentations were written directly in Word. The system worked very well, and ensured a good-quality and up-to-date API documentation without too much work.
I also used the intermediary XML documentation for other purpose, including some code generation, which proved the versatility of XML.
More worthy, full document management system than the efforts being put into word processing.
Conglomerate
Deleted
- Plain XML, without schemas
- Plain XML, with schema (or DTD)
- Database -> XML
- Repository -> XML -(XSLT)-> HTML
- Repository -> XML -(XSLT)-> XML -(XSLT)-> HTML
There are of course variations. Check out IS Architectures - Organizing the Web Server for more details when one of your outputs is HTML.XML is a markup langauge that is supposed to be human readable. Thus anyone can whip up an XML document that describes some data (e.g. documentation on software). It helps if you have standards to make the XML consistent.
Creating schemas for all you different types of documentation is probably the first big pain in the butt you will deal with, but it is pretty essential to get a project like you describe to work. It helps by setting common standards which all participants in your org can use to understand the docs they are looking at. Now you also get some tool support for creating and validating your XML documents.
Store all your documentation data in a database and use common db tools to extract it and format in XML. Why bother? Tool support! Lots of software development project tools support using a db as a repository for the various work products (documentation and code and stuff). This also allows you to have somewhat easier methods for serving your content to interested parties with appropriate security constraints.
Here we add the ability to transform the human-readable-but-cumbersome syntax of XML into html for viewing on a browser. The big effort for this sort of architecture is that you have to create the XSLT for all your different document types and you need some way of linking-to/searching your documents from the html into the repository. Some application and web servers help with this. I'm most familiar with the Java space, and Tomcat with various xml libraries can be made to do this.
This is the most flexible architecture in which pure data XML is transformed into an intermediate form which represents an abstract presentation of the XML and which is then transformed into HTML (or WML or PDF or whatever). The first stage of transformation you need one XSLT style sheet for each document type to convert it into the presentation XML. Then for the second stage you need one stylesheet for each display format. The big advantage here is that if you need to publish to a new document format, you don't need to re-write _all_ of your first stage transformations, you only need to add one new second stage transformation.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Actually, XML is (amongst other things) a meta-language, a means of defining sets of tags. XHTML, a particular set of XML tags, is a replacement for HTML.
this is a BIG jpg that is just a picture of S Ballmer sitting down. Don't bother.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
A good place to start is Open Source XML Database Toolkit by Liam Quin.
The key point is that the best approach depends upon how the data will be accessed, used and updated. There does not appear to be an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solution, even if you go to a commercial platform.
The advantage of XML is that you can start with a simple approach and migrate to a more complex approach without having to do an expensive data conversion.
The disadvantage is that XML can be quite expensive to set up on legacy documents and expensive to maintain as well. For documents that change frequently, have multiple uses, or require precise retrieval strategies, XML is the way to go. It's particularly useful when version control must be tracked at the paragraph level.
If version control takes place at the level of the whole document, retieval is done by keyword, and documents are displayed in one form only, XML may not add anything but trouble.
Let the team gel together. When you see a problem, then bring in some process and tools. Just as with when there is a conflict between the law and custom it isn't law that wins, so it is with process and tools dictated from on high. Process and tools need reasons for existing. By introducing them later, the purpose is clear to the team lead, and more importantly, the purpose is clear to the team. It also allows team members to bring to the table their favorite tools and processes, and the team lead may learn something.
It sounds reactive rather than proactive, but as with XP, it's really a meta-level up where you're planning ahead to be reactive, and you have a quiver of tools and processes at the ready.
Forget about how do you build the repository -- that's easy. (Well, okay, non-trivial, but with databases, cvs, and even just simple shared folders, storing the docs is the least of your worries).
:) ) But again, the long pole of the tent was the editor widget.
I still maintain that the biggest hurdle in any standardized document system (especially if you include multiple concurrent authors) is the front-end editor. I wrote a simple (and highly buggy, I'll admidt, so you who know me keep your traps shut!) VB application that provided a multi-user front end to a database. The back-end (PHP) pulled all the appropriate rows for any given doc together and mashed it into a nice, navigable HTML document. I even had PDF support at one time (but it was even flakier than the GUI).
However, it was not XML, so it was REALLY limited in how easy it was to create new views on the data. The biggest problem I ran into was trying to find a good GUI editor -- this thing was written for security engineers, not HTML experts, and I wanted them to concentrate on content, not tags. I eventually settled (and settled is the right word) on the Microsoft DHTML control. Worked well enough for the time (two years ago at this point), but I still think half my problems stemmed from that widget, or bad interface programming to it. The advantage? WYSIWYG (more or less) editing. Seamless multi-user editing of the same document (well, okay, we had some record locking issues.
Since then, I've wanted very much to rewrite the thing to handle full XML, and I understand there's an effort underway to do just that (I've since moved to different pastures), but it's slow going. I've looked at current technology (ABIword, for example), and i'm just not convinced that it's going to be easy to get a good semi-WYSIWYG XML editor going. At least not on the cheap.
Some time ago was posted here an app called Conglomorate, which I still think has about the best approach to visually representing an XML document. But it hasn't been updated in forever, and was slow/buggy the one time I played with it. More recently, the XMLmind XML Editor (XXE) has shown a lot of promise, even including CSS files for editing DocBook XML. They even have source available. Again, goes a long way to letting you edit diverse XML files in a logical way -- not by forcing you to look at ugly tree-views of an XML file, like so many first-generation editors. Finally, the latest XML Spy editor beta goes a bit father even than XXE, using a full XSLT transform to provide a WYSIWYG format for XML files. Theoretically, with this, you should be able to display any of your documents in whichever approach you like -- full WYSIWYG, tables, trees, block labels, whatever.
Of course, neither of these latter tools work in a concurrent editing fashion. But that's a "minor" enhancement -- put together a robust DB back end, allow for good record locking, editor-to-editor communications for lock management, transaction log to allow back-out of changes, etc. Lots of possibilities. Take XXE, put this kind of capability on the back-end, an integrated login and document management system, and you've got a kick-ass document solution. Work the backend to allow for multi-stage review and publishing, and provide output engines for HTML, PDF, WAP, whatever, serve different subtrees of the system to, say, internal project web servers, external web servers, sales and marketing (for glossies), etc., and everyone can manage everything, real-time, GUI, with one tool.
But I dream.
(seriously -- if anyone's really working this, I'd love to help. I just wanna use it at home for my own web pages.)
I would agree that Doc Book might be a good solution.
I think that the most important thing you can do though is make certain that people do not have to edit XML directly.
Create something that allows them to work without remembering all the tags and brackets and everybody will be happier.
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
Many companies have already created or are creating DTD's (A file to define the parameters of your own brand of XML) :
for example, if your company made car parts, the automotive industy has a working XML data format to define all the details of an automobile. In using existing formats as a basis, you have much of your work done for you and can start with the insight of others in that same industry as to what type of information is likely to be included. This also opens the door to good interoperability and potential use of existing tools to convert your 'CarXML' document into different document formats. The best thing you can do is use existing work like this to build on thus you are
--"Standing on the shoulders of giants"--
The Wiki Wiki Web is a set of editable, cross-referenced web pages. Anybody can view them and anybody can edit them, and they are searchable. Wikis are pretty useful for internal documentation projects. It should be possible to extend the concept to add the security that is typically required and to add support for XML. Of course, all that means I am practically suggesting you write your own custom Wiki, which may take too long for you. But you could probably start with an existing Wiki and get good results. I have set up UseModWiki (which is a CGI script written in Perl) and gotten good results.
Hope this helps!
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
More exactly one of the best incarnation I know of : twiki (twiki.org). Absolutly terrific ! it can be used as a collaboration medium, a knowledge base repository and much, much more, you will find new ways of using it everyday. I have installed it where I work ! and people have been ecstatic !
I work at an ISP ... (not AOL, not MSN) We have a whole department who's in charge of writing up procedural documentation, walkthroughs, how-to's, FAQ's, to solve just about any problem you could ever encounter on almost any platform and operating systems under the sun on your way to getting connected to the internet.
...
:)
As soon as XML standards and derived technologies and languages (XSLT, DOM, and more) started to be strongly established nearly 2 years ago, we moved whatever existing documentation we had into XML, conforming to internally developed DTD's and specs, after a couple guys and I built a handy HTTP-based authoring tool that leverages technologies built-in Internet Explorer 5.0 which I've previously described right here, allowing writers to not have to know anything about XML, and simply click their way thru easy interactive forms, in a fairly compelling user interface
With all of our information stored in XML, we can easily present it to various audiences, may it be our members who can search it by keywords to help themselves in our online support area or our technical support reps who can browse directory trees to specific XML documents and have access to more detailed information about hardware and platform configurations, document revision information and more.
The bottom line is this system works really well. And we have the amazing peace of mind of having GREAT information in a format that can never become completely obsolete, and that is always a couple XSLT stylesheets away from fitting just about *any* need.
Whether you make up your own DTD's or follow existing standard DTD's like DocBook mentioned in other posts, as long as you put some thought into structuring your XML data at the beginning, you can only win in the long run: XML documents can easily be processed into other XML DTDs/formats to represent the information in a way that better fits another application, and/or transformed into other documents made of a markup language meant for presentation like HTML or WAP.
yea. XML is nifty.
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At my company (in fact it's a local branch of an US based corporation) we have similar problem. There is a team here developing a system designed specifically for a customer. As one can expect along with such a system goes all the documentation - everything you could expect starting from the analysis, through functional specification and coding guidelines to end user and administrator's manuals. To make things more complicated part of the development - and the documentation - is being done by a subcontractor (which happens to be on another hemisphere) - and it is being prepared in English, but some parts of it (especially the manuals) have to be translated into local language.
Up until now it has been a growing mess with documentation being written in Word (with all the usual problems Word has with large files, with lots of graphics - screens, no versioning etc.), with no standards, with people getting into one another's way while trying to update the numerous documents.
Recently together with a friend we have came up with the idea to switch all that into neat XML/SGML files, with CVS based versioning and everything based on open standards and free software as much as possible. To our surprise the management liked the idea and we got a green light to do some research. And then the problems have begun.
First, the editor. Coding XML files with vi or alike might be nice for a hacker - and is great for creating and testing XML formats used then for data storage etc. - but it is out of the question for documentation authors. And it is pretty understandable - to be able to concentrate on the content, on the text itself, the author needs to see only the contents, as nicely rendered as possible - no tags getting into way in each sentence, no learning for years how to use the editor (thus Emacs with its psgml mode is not an option - don't flame me, it's just a fact). After a long search I have to say that there is no working, finished GNU/free editor that would match our requirement of almost-WYWSIG presentation of an XML/SGML file. As to commercial ones the only two that look good are XML Spy 4.0 - but it is just a poorely working beta for now - and Arbortext's Epic - which is almost exactly what we need, but is a bit expensive at around $700 a license.
Nevertheless, with no other options left we decided to go for the Epic when it comes to the editing side. We got an evaluation package and begun testing.
Now, we were from the start convinced that DocBook DTD & tools that go along with it are the best choice for the kind of problem we faced. Epic supports the DocBook but comes along with their own version, which in turns doesn't work well with the Linux sgml tools that we use for translating the XML/SGML files to useful end formats. On the other hand not all Epic's features can be used when one just tries to edit the document based on an "external" DTD. To enable things like being able to see the graphics files inserted into the document one has to hm... "customize" the Epic by creating some additional configuration files (like .FOS files) using yet another expensive tool Arbortext sells - the Epic Architect.
But that is not the end of the problem, because the stylesheets currently available for translating the Docbook based XML/SGML files into useful formats are not well documented and partially don't work (for example tags related to inserting pictures in the document are ignored when trying to generate a printable document). There is for example a project on Sourceforge that develops XSLTs and DSSSLs for translating Docbook based XML into various formats, but so far I was not able to make them work - and there is no documentation. Also the DSSSL based machinery for translating SGML files that comes with various Linux distros is far from perfect - HTMLs are generated mostly OK, but printed documents (.tex and .pdf) leave much to be desired.
So, from our point of view it looks like we will have to buy an expensive editor and then someone would have to spend a month or so tweaking the editor, modifying the stylesheets for our needs, developing procedures and so on. And that someone would have to be quite a competent person (with deep knowledge of the subject), someone, who could be probably better used directly in the development project.
As for now the future of our little plan of switching from mess to neat XML based solution is uncertain. Mainly because we would have to build that neat solution ourselves, as what we can get from outside at the moment are some bits and pieces that - although nice by themselves - just don't fit together.
(And, BTW, I haven't even touched the nice catch with CVS - to be really useful in the kind of environment that we envisioned it would have to be integrated with the editor - and that doesn't seem likely).
True enough, but it doesn't answer the original question. Can MS-Word (or even StarOffice, if you want a non-MS option) output XML? I know it will output HTML, but it's such a bastardized mass of proprietary and font/format specific crap that it's essentially useless unless you extensive filter it first.
The whole point here is not to create pretty formatted documents, but to leverage the power of XML to add context and meaning to the content of the documents in order to create a rich and interlinked heirarchy of information. Conventional word processors just create blobs of information -- pretty formatted blobs, but blobs nonetheless...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
For links between document, use the w3c's XLink Specification
OpenOffice (the equivilant of Mozilla to StarOffice/Netscape) has gone to an XML format for its native format. It's actually several XML files Zipped up in an archive, but you can easily open it and look at the plain XML. Check out the recent builds of OpenOffice. Many of the gripes against StarOffice 5.2 have been resolved.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
The biggest barrier I've encountered in small or startup environments to something like this is organizational "buy in". For example, at $workplace[-1] I wrote a defect tracking system custom tuned for us. Worked pretty well on a technical level ... but nobody used it becuase with < 10 people, it was easier to just turn around and hand somebody a postit-note bug report.
Then again, that is characteristic of one of the central challenges facing a small organization, namely how to grow the structures to make a larger organization maintainable. I.e. overcoming the "this is a pain in the ass, why do we need this now?" factor. The answer to this depends strongly on the people involved, but if you can make the system about as painless as typing into an ASCII file or scribbling on a postit, you stand a better chance of success.
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You really don't want to get involved in building browsing and editing tools for an arbitrary schema, its not worth the time.
I've not seen this point of view expressed much on Slashdot, so here goes:
Microsoft have been very clever getting where they are today. One of the principal means they have got there is using the interfaces between different functional elements like keys, to lock customers in, and lock competing technologies out.
XML is a simple, standard way of formatting diverse information types so that it is easy to exchange data between applications, and easy to write programs for. It is brilliant in it's simplicity, and anyone who has studied it will know that it is 'not just another format', but one of the most important standards ever developed in the history of computing.
This represents a huge threat to Microsoft as it threatens one of their main strategies. I believe that everyone in the open source world should learn XML and it's associated standards, and use them as far as possible in their programming work. If, for instance, the open source community adopts DocBook, or Sun's forthcoming XML standard for documents, for all open source word processors, I don't think it will be long before there are so many useful document manipulation applications available that there will be a compelling business reason to move from Microsoft Word to an open source alternative.
Learn XML folks!!!
(There are probably a few reading this who are thinking - 'but Microsoft says that their office file formats are now XML based'. To you all I can say is that you should learn XML, and then you'll realise that what Microsoft is doing doesn't really have anything to do with what XML is all about).
The system we use here ( I won't give out a URL as it'll be slashdotted - suffice to say we're a Cambridge UK based ASP ) is to write all of the latest documentation in XML and just browse around using XSL processing instructions in the original file. It all works nicely and we even have XSL files that are processed by other XSL files to produce HTML based on the internal comments which works very nicely.
We solved the interconnection of the files by having one uber XML structure file that works like a tree contents so you can navigate around because the XSL generates links to the other documents as layed out in the XML file using the document().
Get into XSL it's loverly.
As an aside we even have an XML that contains directives to run external XSLs on the source XML and stitch the results back into the original XML and re-apply. It's a great way to expand things.
We use it for website construction.
What you really need is a source code system that can recognize that the input is XML and convert the document to canonical form before applying the diff. Unfortunately you would have to write code, the C14N for XML is, well utterly unsuited for that task.
Alternatively you could switch to a source code manager that used compression across the different archived versions rather than a simple diff. Unfortunately that probably involves writing the code yourself.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The system we use here ( I won't give out a URL as it'll be slashdotted - suffice to say we're a Cambridge UK based ASP ) is to write all of the latest documentation in XML and just browse around using XSL processing instructions in the original file. It all works nicely and we even have XSL files that are processed by other XSL files to produce HTML based on the internal comments which works very nicely.
We solved the interconnection of the files by having one uber XML structure file that works like a tree contents so you can navigate around because the XSL generates links to the other documents as layed out in the XML file using the document().
Get into XSL it's loverly.
As an aside we even have an XML that contains directives to run external XSLs on the source XML and stitch the results back into the original XML and re-apply. It's a great way to expand things.
We use it for website construction.
Clearly having the document stored as XML is superior because you can convert it to whatever you want, and the tags represent the document's meaning rather than its appearance. But producing the document using raw tags is not friendly; it discourages documenters.
What editor do you use?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
That one gets fed into a custom repository system which automatically generates all the code we need for using the objects, including javadocs and XML documents, when then go into the rest of the channel for documentation. The repository system also generates multiple types of storage back-ends (Oracle, Postgres, Java Serialization, In-Memory-Only, etc.) so that the engineers never have to worry about data access code, and we can change what type of storage we're using at a customer site.
So in that respect, we're using Visio or MagicDraw just for the documentation of the UML model, but the "real" model is always in XML and only used by the repository system we've developed.
You're dealing with different problems here.
DocBook, and any decent document XML DTD, gives you the ability to tag your text with some description of what it means. It might be "chapter" or "list," or it might be domain specific like "files," "bugs" and "see also" (for man pages). The presentation details are left to the processing software to handle.
MS-Word, in contrast, is nothing but a paint tool for words. You can certainly give your styles names that have some domain meaning to you, but it's still ultimately nothing but a set of style instructions.
For a single document, this isn't a big issue. But if you have a lot of documents and you want to reuse content, it's impossible with the MS-Word approach. With DocBook, in contrast, it's easy to set up your documents so that the same file can be reused in multiple places, but only selected content will be reused.
IMHO, if your technical writers can't make the shift to meaningful tags, you're better off without them. (The writers, not the tags.) If they can't handle this level of structure, their writing is undoubtably muddled and confused no matter how pretty it looks.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Epic's site says "Customization: C++, Java, Perl, TCL and Visual Basic programs can be written to customize Epic Editor operation." so you should be able to grab some of the code off the net (eg WinCVS's) and link in CVS support yourself.
OK, time to play the devil's advocate (I am actually a big XML fan): here are the problems you should expect when switching all your docs to XML:
In short XML is probably a good choice, it gives at least independance from the word processing software and allows you to include/retrieve data automatically in/from your documents, but don't underestimate the trouble you will have to go through to get to your "integrated-wonderful-all-encompassing system" (which doesn't exist right now, so you will get it in version 1.0...
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Ever heard of the viso-ish tool called 'Dia'? It's a GTK based application, with ports to Win32. It stores all of it's diagrams in an XML format nativly. It's not as robust as Visio, but it diagrams all my thoughts out rather nicely and I can send them over to all the other developers using Win32 platforms.
:)
Sounds like a nice system -- and a well organized team. You hiring?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm all for standards, but I really don't like XML. I know, I know, I must be the only one. Maybe its my exposure to it, or maybe its what my company wants to do with it, but I'm just not a fan. For documentation at my company we use a mix of ASCII text files, Word files, or whatever the writer wants. My biggest beef with XML is that it is amazingly slow to parse (can you tell, I'm a programmer) and clunky (I hate all those tags). I think XML is a buzz word that caught on in the eyes of corporate management and they decided it sounded cool so they made everyone support it.
Personally, I like Latex. I just started to get into it, but its really easy to learn, and it converts into nice looking postscript, or PDF files. Its so easy to convert a plane text file into a latex file. Who needs this Microsoft crap anyway?
I've been working on a project to document software engineering methodology and best practices (eventually to be published and freely available). The content is written in XML. I wrote the DTDs for the basic document types and XSL stylesheets for output to HTML. I've written a few docs already for the system (two, three dozen or more). Some notes on my experience.
1) Editing: I find the XML editors available online to be slow to use. I don't want to click on a tree to navigate through my document--too much mouse work--and I find the format for editing individual nodes is cumbersome if you have a complex document structure. I settled on using a good text editor (EditPlus, not free) with some templates for automatically inserting large node sections that are typically edited in a block. The editor has syntax-highlighting so it's easy to differentiate the XML from the content. I also have template files for quickly starting a new document of each type, with all the basic nodes already pasted within so I can open a new template and start typing.
2) Display: I wrote some simple XSL sheets to start with, that just displayed the XML in a readable, basic HTML format. I have my editor linked to a script that transforms the current XML on command, and opens the HTML in the same editor--so I can quickly preview the results. I use the Apache Xalan XSL processor with Java JDK 1.3. I also have an Apache/Jakarta Ant script to transform all documents on comment. Since I started, I have spent some time improving the layout, but writing a basic XSL for display is not difficult--I recommend having basic ones around (no gifs, simple tables, etc.) for no-nonsense preview of the content.
3) Navigation: I have specific tags in my docs (like reference or ext-reference for linking documents. The XSL generates the appropriate tag for navigation, based on attributes in the tag. My newer approach is to generate either static links or a link to a Java servlet with the page name; the servlet then handles the navigation request. The servlet approach has the advantage that it can eventually transform documents on the fly, allow you to specify a transformation type (e.g. pretty, simple, text-only) and even to pull content from a repository.
4) Content management: Right now I use directories to manage the content, since I support 5 document types, and use the file names to distinguish the content. I spent a bunch of time when I started figuring out the DTDs of the various document types so I would organize content most efficiently and with little or no duplication of intent. I recommend that approach--it's been a lot easier, when I want to write, to identify the document type I want, open a template, and start typing. I think this is where the first real effort comes, not in picking an editor, etc., but in deciding exactly how the information will be categorized. It's important to have searchable content, or content you need to introspect, to be pulled out from the main. For example, in using a reference tag, I can write a verification routine that checks the reference is valid (e.g. if a file, check that the file exists). I try to avoid writing anything I would need to parse out--for example, dumping a code sample write within a text block. I'd rather have a code-sample tag for easy identification.
I'd stress that the biggest hassle has been getting the XSL to work properly and generate readable XML, especially for more involved document structures. It's easy to break and hard to debug! In that vein, I recommend starting with very simple XSLs that output really really simple HTML and building up from there.
-Pdoubleya
"I honestly would vote libertarian if their candidates weren't usually total cooks."--slashdot poster
I developed a system like this for a previous job. We started with a source browser and then began checking engineering documents into our repository and (thus) making them browsable on the web
It can be really be nice. The hardest things were social issues; it requires a bit more discipline to maintain documents in a repository than by file sharing and email. Establishing the taxonomy so that people know where to put things and where to look for them is critical; but getting a good search engine up[1] can help there. Using small documents to redirect browsers to the "right" place can also help, since you can take a document that spans categories and put it in multiple places. I also wanted to get a Wiki in place, but left before we got there.
Having the revisions of design docs and test specs (which always change as implementation proceeds) tied to the appropriate revs of the software and other documentation using CVS tags, perforce change #'s/labels, or whatever is really nice.
As far as linking, HTML and MSOffice links were always made relative to the current document, so you could browse them when you'd checked them out on to your local machine. That was another social issue: educationing people to be careful, since most HTML editors and MSOffice HTML manglers of that vintage needed a little extra care to create relative links.
Since this was software engineering, we also implemented in-browser diffs (a lot like CVS web) and source code browsing as research tools. Having the design and discovery ("hey! so that's how this code works!" "Quick write it down before you forget!") docs that can link to the source code means that a new team member can read through a design doc and jump in and see the source code (where we kept implementation documentation).
You can modify your server-side source code browser to find things like file:../../design/index.xml in source files and convert them http: links when browsed, then use an editor or xterm that activates embedded links and be able to refer to design docs in soruce code. This also allow developers to link out to web sites, though we slurped anything that important in to the repo to protect against bit rot.
Since you've choosen XML a priori, you should definitely look at AxKit (Perl-based) or Cocoon (if Java's your fave) as delivery vehicles. Both are ASF official projects, though AxKit is a recent addition and hasn't made it to an Apache webserver.
Never used Cocoon, but AxKit can easily back-end to CVS and apply whatever transformations you like. AxKit can apply it's own XPathScript and XSP (language="perl") style sheets; various C-based XSLT engines (Sablotron and libxslt come to mind); and, of course, 100% Pure Perl to thoroughly munge your docs. Then it caches the results (if you like) and optionally GZips them (which is nice for dial-up or VPN use).
AxKit's main drawback at the moment is that it's web site is down due to sluggishness of British Telecom in installing a new data line, but you can find out more by searching cpan for the AxKit module.
If you do it right, you will have a very cool system.
HTH,
Barrie
[1] We did this before XML was all the rage, and getting meaningful searches of MSOffice files checked in to a reposiroty was a right pain. We ended up sharing out a directory tree that was updated nightly with the head revisions and letting people search with MSOffice's built in File Find.
Here's a way to get and enforce structure in Word documents.
Word allows named styles, and with View>Normal you can even show the stylenames on the screen (Tools>Options>Style area width).You can create a template with paragraph and character styles that correspond to the structure you want. The template can hack the toolbars: put your styles on a toolbar and in the pop-up menu, if you want. Have the template change the Save command to save docs in rtf.
Users write in Word. Save into the CMS. In the CMS gui, choose validate or finish.
The CMS gui then launches a series of processes. First, convert the rtf to xml-like tags, based on the styles used in the document. Second, run some clean-up script to make a well-formed xml document. Third, run a script to do any validations that xml can't handle. Fourth, run a standard xml validator. If the validator finds a problem, you fix it back in Word. You only edit Word files. To preview, translate down to xhtml.
Users will have to cooperate, but then they're usually paid to cooperate. RTF is nasty, but this is as straightforward a conversion as you can get. The biggest problem is Word's lists. You could either guess at lists based on formatting, or require (hidden) begin/end list paragraph styles.
I think this approach could let you escape Word. Next upgrade, you could switch to Star Office or KWord.
A little more detail.
The W3's Amaya lets you open two windows onto the same document, one a nice gui editor/browser and the other xhtml plain text. Saving in one window updates the other. For collaborative editing, see their Jigsaw with WebDAV.
/. has been on a /long/ lunch break.)
For searching my docs, i use Apache and ht://Dig. And for quick, organized access to the same docs i created a PHP4 application that allows me to easily create categories, assign docs to them, and to title the documents. That app, with an ht://Dig search field, is my home page, and it works great. Basically i re-created the functionality of a Lotus Notes db i used to use at work (w/o collaboration or replication features) while keeping all the data accessible to any other app that speaks xhtml.
If there's interest i'll post the PHP4 code somewhere. (If i can ever get just get this message posted.
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
The real problem is finding a good document-oriented XML editor. It is impossible to convince most of the users to edit documents in XML source, and most of the word-processor-like XML editors available are expensive and either feature incomplete or not very user friendly. We're looking at Morphon at the moment, primarily for the platform independance, but it has some problems.
I work for a financial/banking development company. We began a project a few months ago that takes all of our internal documentation (tech specs, user source, source descriptions, data library, design specs, database and client information) and builds an XML based library. Obviously we aren't rewriting all of our docs to meet a formalized XML standard, however we are attaching tag information on each document that categorizes and describes the document.
A standard for future specs (and whenever rewrites are required of old specs) is being drafted so that all documentation can be parsed and searched with the full power and blessed beauty that is XML!!
GO UBERGEEKS!!
To code is to foo. Or.. is it to foo is to code..
This is what we do. It works, and it solves many of the issues associated with traditional documentation "systems".
1. Define a DTD of the elements you will need in your documents. You can go with a predefined DTD like DOCBOOK, or you can roll your own. Because my goal was to get engineers to write as many documents as possible (thereby making my life easier), I chose to create my own DTD - There's about 60 elements. Special documents (like projects, or resumes, for example) have their own
DTD (and XSL) in order to keep the main documentation DTD as simple as possible.
2. Create a general XSL sheet that transforms all
documents which conform to the DTD into HTML for your internal web-site - all of the presentation
logic is in this one XSL sheet (although it can use xsl:include if you'd like to break it up by header, table of contents, content, footer, etc).
3. Set up documentation sub-branch(es) in the source control system. (In the
code base and QA/infrastructure/whatever else you plan to document and publish). The closer it is to the code, the more likely that engineers will add reviewcomments, fix errors, update it, etc.
4. Anyone and everyone writing documents does so
according to DTD and checks them into the designated directory structure in the source control repository. (As far as they are concerned, this is the end of their work -- it just magically appears on the site)
5. Set up Ant to use one of the Trax processors (I use Xalan2).
6. Write general purpose ant targets to convert
documentation with general XSL sheet, build indexes, etc. Write build.xml files that call these tasks and convert/index/etc all the documentation in each sub-branch.
7. A monkey or chron-job converts the documentation and pushes it to the website.
Benefits:
Tables of Contents, Index pages, indexing, image-links, etc. are all generated. There is a much lower chance of links being broken.
Once you get the XSL right, you don't have to worry about consistency with the look and feel.
You really can just concentrate on content.
In my experience, engineers are much more likely
to use VI/emacs to edit/review a document than Word or Framemaker. The GUI XML editors are getting better...
Drawbacks:
Someone has to own the DTD, beat their head against the wonderful syntax of xslt, and be willing to decipher the Ant stack traces when things inexplicably bail.
It's not yet commonly done (or at least they don't post on may newsgroups), so often you are charging ahead without much feedback.
Technical writers are difficult to hire. We haven't tried to find another one yet, but I imagine asking people to write in XML will limit our talent pool. Of course... in theory I could make all this work with Framemaker+SGML...
You don't have to rewrite the entire source control software, just put in a filter. CVS has a number of hooks for this - at a minimum you should run an XML validator to ensure that only valid XML is checked in.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
For my mini-freelancing business I need to occasionally write business stuff such as offers and invoices. What I have been looking for without success in the last days is a collection of some simple, free DTD's and ideally some accompanying XSL Stylesheets for business letters.
I am familiar with docbook/emacs/psgml. Just thought there might be something that is to simple business letters the same that docbook is to documentation. There is also this minor-mode for emacs that looks very promising: xslt-process - it would make sense to use emacs with this for correspondence to have automatically pdf's generated.
What I'd need is much less sophisticated then docbook though, just something that intelligently suggests some tags for - in the case of an invoice - items, price, customer etc.
Any hints anybody? Somebody have fragments of such stuff lying around?
I didn't realize this thread was already going when I posted, so I'm pasting it in again here:
This is what we do. It works, and it solves many of the issues associated with traditional documentation "systems".
1. Define a DTD of the elements you will need in your documents. You can go with a predefined DTD like DOCBOOK, or you can roll your own. Because my goal was to get engineers to write as many documents as possible (thereby making my life easier), I chose to create my own DTD - There's about 60 elements. Special documents (like projects, or resumes, for example) have their own
DTD (and XSL) in order to keep the main documentation DTD as simple as possible.
2. Create a general XSL sheet that transforms all
documents which conform to the DTD into HTML for your internal web-site - all of the presentation
logic is in this one XSL sheet (although it can use xsl:include if you'd like to break it up by header, table of contents, content, footer, etc).
3. Set up documentation sub-branch(es) in the source control system. (In the
code base and QA/infrastructure/whatever else you plan to document and publish). The closer it is to the code, the more likely that engineers will add reviewcomments, fix errors, update it, etc.
4. Anyone and everyone writing documents does so
according to DTD and checks them into the designated directory structure in the source control repository. (As far as they are concerned, this is the end of their work -- it just magically appears on the site)
5. Set up Ant to use one of the Trax processors (I use Xalan2).
6. Write general purpose ant targets to convert
documentation with general XSL sheet, build indexes, etc. Write build.xml files that call these tasks and convert/index/etc all the documentation in each sub-branch.
7. A monkey or chron-job converts the documentation and pushes it to the website.
Benefits:
Tables of Contents, Index pages, indexing, image-links, etc. are all generated. There is a much lower chance of links being broken.
Once you get the XSL right, you don't have to worry about consistency with the look and feel.
You really can just concentrate on content.
In my experience, engineers are much more likely
to use VI/emacs to edit/review a document than Word or Framemaker. The GUI XML editors are getting better...
Drawbacks:
Someone has to own the DTD, beat their head against the wonderful syntax of xslt, and be willing to decipher the Ant stack traces when things inexplicably bail.
It's not yet commonly done (or at least they don't post on may newsgroups), so often you are charging ahead without much feedback.
Technical writers are difficult to hire. We haven't tried to find another one yet, but I imagine asking people to write in XML will limit our talent pool. Of course... in theory I could make all this work with Framemaker+SGML...
I would love it if my company switched to an XML based document repository, but the biggest problem we face is that certain collegues _need_ to use Microsoft Word, and at present, we don't have the $$ to justify purchasing a mid 5 figure document conversion program. Does anyone know of maybe an open-source project that is trying to achieve document conversion between a standard XML DTD (like DocBook?) and MS Word? It would have to be able to convert both XML->DOC and DOC->XML. Maybe an inexpensive solution for smaller organizations?
I seriously think the Everything http://www.everything2.com/ engine would be a great way to maintain documentation on a project. I know it isn't XML based but I am sure one could easily connect to the database and kick out the needed files and put them into XML. The meat of this gentleman's quesstion was "How do you link your documents?" Currently we link ours with Rational Requisite Pro. Which if anyone took the time to actually use it would be very beneficial. But what better tool for linking than Everything? I can easily add a link by adding brackets around a [link]. If I want to [link] to the [requirements] or a specific requirement [req1.4.2] or a use case [Authenticate User] I just add brackets.
I am preparing to start a new project. I may have to install [Everything] first to see if it will work. Just have to make a couple of rules like all requirements must have a [Requirements] link so that they can all be found. Or better yet, instead of using Person, Place, Idea or Thing you could use Requirements, Use-Cases, Test Cases etc... Interesting idea. Customize [E2] to be a requirements/documentation management system.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
We need something better. We need an interface like kword or abiword or lyx, all three of which offer:
but not a single one of which offers docbook/xml import, which is critical if you are writing documentation in XML. XML is designed to be the source, the font from which all formatted, renderable versions (read: pdf, html, rtf, txt, etc.) spring. Hence, it must be the saved version, the one you keep in your source/document control system. The others are just conversions from XML. Yet no editor imports XML! This ought to be the easy part! You just write an XSL stylesheet to convert XML-of-your-choice into your editor's internal format.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
reading lots of this shit is so irritating... seems everybody keeps thinking of working in text or word, this sounds like hell to me. depending on microsoft tools in your workflow is asking for headaches. this from experience.
yeah, might cost you money, but what about framemaker, indesign or quark. you will have trouble, but if you are a *programmer*, you can easily extract tagged text from documents, store them as xml in a database and translate for presentation on the way back out.
doing this now to publish about 16000 pages per year, reducing price errors on catalog pages (saving upwards of 15 million dollars according to some marketing wonk), it just works. the editors basically get it, not hard.
we preserve not just style, but meaning. able to handle all sorts of funky evolving business/presentation policy via simple parsing. got people around here wondering if i'm a genius.
(if anyone wants to do something like this in another publishing shop, write me and we can talk about challenges... fair warning: this is macos based workflow, getting something going on windows should be easy though)
dozens of workflow/asset management vendors charge upwards of 500000$ to introduce simple database technology to clients, closed solutions that put mis programmers out on the street and force client groups to work according to a prefab plan.
the only thing some of these assholes have going is some glue code to move data in-and-out of word/quark/whatever...
thinking of writing up a general open solution, something like the arsdigita system, for publishing workflow/asset management, give it away and sell consultant programming. do me a favor, beat me to this pipe dream!
Our campany is just now starting to mandate that all released documents shall be in .pdf form (original word, solidworks, whatever still available). We tried to get XML accepted at our company, but we couldn't get the big wigs on board.
.pdf (nearly). Even big wigs can probably use .pdf. I think that once a company has realized the gain from the efficiencies of a common document platform (.pdf), big wigs will be much more likely to invest money in the deployment of .xml
Everyone uses
This doesn't solve the problem necessarily. If you add a tag fairly high up the hierarchy, you could end up shifting a lot of content in an indentation level. The content has hardly changed, but the diff is huge.
This assumes your standardized XML is indented, as it often is. I think the ideal CVS filter would be to have *no* indentation.