RE: Documenting an XML format -- how much detail?

["France Baril" <France -dot- Baril -at- ixiasoft -dot- com>]

Jon, for xml schemas, you will notice that there is an element for
documentation purposes. The xs:annotation/xs:documentation let's you
enter information about each element, simple type, complex type or
attribute. 

It makes it easy to have an xsl create the whole documentation for you,
you can even include links to parents, children elements, simple and
complex types.

If you do not need your documentation to have a specific look, free
tools that parse your schema and produce documentation based on the
xs:documentation element are available on the internet. However, as you
cannot customize the look, they are not always great for documentation
that you send to clients or partners.

I have developed such a tool myself, so if you decide to go down that
way and need help, I could help get you started. 

Keep in mind that most of your XML tools, except DTDs, are structured
documents that can be documented easily thought automated processes
using xsl.

It takes time to get started, but than all the work gets done for you,
except of course for adding the few documentation tags.

Hope this helps,

France

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Jacob Jinglehymerschmidt [mailto:techwritersf -at- yahoo -dot- com] 
Sent: January 14, 2004 5:08 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Documenting an XML format -- how much detail?



Has anyone here had to document an XML interface? 

The product in question is an XML library, magic value
pair inputs (via HTTP) and it spits out XML. The
product also provides XML Schema (for electronic
parsing) and XMLT files (for HTML export).

that's nice and all, but some (10-30%) of the users
will need to read/parse the XML data directly.

The question is: how much should the "developer
documentation" document? One could argue that anyone
who cares should just read the XML Schema. On the
other hand, maybe it's good to give a
works-for-most-people walk-through of the likely
return results.

What do you folks think?

Are there "standard practices" for this? I'm delighted
to write a lot or a little (I get paid either way).
But what's the ***expectation*** in the XML community
with respect to documenting the XML other than just
handing them the XML schema file?

-- TechWriterSF