Re: Giving up on XML

[Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>]

Mike Starr wrote:
> <snip>
> But just out of curiosity, if one skips a level, is that inherently evil? 
> Isn't the resulting document still intact with respect to the heirarchy? And 
> even if it isn't is that in itself a fatal flaw if I can look at the 
> document structure and still make sense of it? In my case, there's nobody to 
> impose structure on my documents other than my own built-in standards that I 
> adhere to.
 
 
This is an issue of documentation methodology and style, but not really 
so much about structure in the XML sense. 
 
 
But you're right, documentation has other uses for structure (as a 
template for information collection, as a visual cue to a document's 
organization, ...), and IMHO human consumers and writers of 
documentation do seem to prefer documentation that has not been fully 
elaborated with empty-but-logical structure.  I think of XML as a system 
for describing information to computers.  Indeed, one of the standard 
uses of XML is for identifying data elements in an electronic stream of 
information, for example from a web form to a database, or from a bank 
ATM to the transaction processing system.  Sometimes we need to do 
documentation for people that way, sometimes not.
  
 
Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com 
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