Adobe has a plug-in for IE and many nice SVG demos. Unfortunately the plug-in is not integrated into IE, so you have to download it.
IE directly supports VML (try it here if you are using IE), which does more or less the same as SVG except that it's older, not standardized, and only supported by Microsoft.
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.
Because I have no friends, no money and no intelligence, so I have nothing else to do during my nights and holidays.
Because I am a masochist. In the world of commercial software, the users depend on the software because they paid so much for it that they're not going to change to a competitor soon. In the world of free software, the developer depends on the users because he spent so much time developing it that he doesn't want them to turn to another free competitor.
Developing free software brings discontentment, angst and bore. Discontentment before you publish it because you feel you would write it more quickly if you were not so lazy. Angst when you publish it because you're afraid people will notice how incompetent you are. Bore because, several months later, people keep asking you for feature enhancements and you don't care about that little piece of code any more.
Because, when I publish free software, I have no way to know how many people use it, so I can imagine that I have millions of users. I don't receive any mail from them simply because my software has no bugs, and nobody ever mentions it in a public place because everybody already knows about it. If I charged the people with money, I would know how few people really are interesting in my software.
Because sometimes I unwisely say in a newsgroup that I'm going to develop such and such thing, and afterwards I found I don't really want to do it. But since I have said it in a public place, I feel compelled to complete it.
This debate reveals a lot about the cultural differences between America and continental Europe (not only France). One of the main points is that, while the most important thing for the American is freedom, the French government usually thinks more about equality. That is why education is not expensive here (I'm French), and why everybody has to speak the same language (French). For that reason the government and the administration have a prominent role in France, and there are a lot of laws and rules. Freedom is hardly mentioned in the French Constitution, while the first article says that:
[France] ensures the equality before the law of all citizens, without distinction of origin, race or religion.
On the contrary, the American always speak about freedom and their 1st Amendment, as it were sufficient to provide democracy, success and happiness. In Europe, the governments have a different approach. In the same way the American think that it is dangerous for their children to see a bare breast on television, the European think that it is dangerous to let Nazi objects become too banal in our society. Maybe WW2 would not have happened if anti-semitism had not been banal in the 30s, who knows. The idea is that freedom, like capitalism, is a good thing, but it is only a means, not an end.
Our governments may be wrong, and sometimes they goes too far : I remember that Noam Chomsky was considered as a revisionist by some people because he said that a revisionist should be allowed to express his opinions. But you must remember that it is more a cultural difference than anything else. The US economy works better than the French economy, but France is just as much a democracy as the United States.
(Another example of cultural difference is obvious these days with the US presidential election: in Europe, it would be a great scandal to see the candidates go to court to win the election. Everybody would scorn the winner; in America, it's perfectly legitimate.)
Something fascinates me about these questions: it's the difference between what is important in these election for the American, and for the rest of the world. These questions only deal with US internal affairs (except the last one, which is very vague). But the president of the United States is also the most powerful man in the world, the modern equivalent of the Emperor of Rome, and everybody in the world is interested in the results.
Here in France, when the journalists write about the US elections, there are two major issues:
the political and military actions of the US in the world (pax americana)
the death penalty
(ok, I am still Europe-centric when I make an analogy with Rome)
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe has a plug-in for IE and many nice SVG demos. Unfortunately the plug-in is not integrated into IE, so you have to download it.
IE directly supports VML (try it here if you are using IE), which does more or less the same as SVG except that it's older, not standardized, and only supported by Microsoft.
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.
Developing free software brings discontentment, angst and bore. Discontentment before you publish it because you feel you would write it more quickly if you were not so lazy. Angst when you publish it because you're afraid people will notice how incompetent you are. Bore because, several months later, people keep asking you for feature enhancements and you don't care about that little piece of code any more.
On the contrary, the American always speak about freedom and their 1st Amendment, as it were sufficient to provide democracy, success and happiness. In Europe, the governments have a different approach. In the same way the American think that it is dangerous for their children to see a bare breast on television, the European think that it is dangerous to let Nazi objects become too banal in our society. Maybe WW2 would not have happened if anti-semitism had not been banal in the 30s, who knows. The idea is that freedom, like capitalism, is a good thing, but it is only a means, not an end.
Our governments may be wrong, and sometimes they goes too far : I remember that Noam Chomsky was considered as a revisionist by some people because he said that a revisionist should be allowed to express his opinions. But you must remember that it is more a cultural difference than anything else. The US economy works better than the French economy, but France is just as much a democracy as the United States.
(Another example of cultural difference is obvious these days with the US presidential election: in Europe, it would be a great scandal to see the candidates go to court to win the election. Everybody would scorn the winner; in America, it's perfectly legitimate.)
- the political and military actions of the US in the world (pax americana)
- the death penalty
(ok, I am still Europe-centric when I make an analogy with Rome)