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Re: [xsl] XSL-FO and XSD Information request

2006-03-17 12:54:17
Kamal,

Not only can it be done, but doing this kind of thing is one of the main motivating factors in the design of XSD in XML syntax. Since XSD is expressed in XML, documentation of XSDs can be developed using the same tools (XSLT, XSL-FO) that create presentation formats out of any other XML. (The same thing is true of Relax NG, which similarly has an XML syntax that expands nicely to include documentation.)

I'm afraid you won't find much in the way of "off-the-shelf" solutions to try, however, very easily, or not without plenty of customization. I think the main reason for this is that there is too wide a range of things you might want to do, and too many possible maintenance models for your schemas and docs, so the 80/20 design point is hard to find for a truly generic toolkit. Different projects will have very different display and linking requirements, for example, for their documentation, to say nothing of different requirements for what the documentation itself needs to describe, and how.

Much of Mulberry's schema documentation is built this way, however, and we're not the only ones. The thing is, that's part of the special value we provide our clients, and not something we're able to develop and support for the world at large. So in general we (and many other schema designers will say the same, I think) can affirm that yes, it's doable, and in principle a good idea (assuming you know what you're doing); but we can't say much more beyond that than ask the classic question: "what are your requirements?". Whether it's hard or not depends on the task. It's not hard to do lots of useful stuff; but particular tasks can be quite challenging, depending on what kind of schema you have. Perhaps the biggest conceptual challenge is in developing a good sense of which tasks can be automated easily and usefully, and which ones are better left for sensible people to do.

As for Cocoon, sure, it's up to the job. While I haven't done this on Cocoon, I've done other things, and I've done this outside Cocoon, and see no reason why it wouldn't be perfectly suitable if that's how you wanted to do it.

Cheers,
Wendell

At 11:40 AM 3/17/2006, Jay wrote:
I've created a system that turns content stored in XML into PDF (through
XSLT to XSL-FO and then through FOP), Word (through XSLT to WordML), HTML
(throught XSLT), JavaHelp (through XSLT), and text (through XSLT).

So, what you have in mind can be done.

I believe it can be done through Cocoon, too, but I haven't yet had a client
who wanted me to do that, so I can't say from experience.

Jay Bryant
Bryant Communication Services


----- Original Message -----
From: "Kamal Bhatt" <kbhatt(_at_)tt(_dot_)com(_dot_)au>
To: <xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 1:47 AM
Subject: [xsl] XSL-FO and XSD Information request


>
> Hi
> I am trying to convince my co-workers that having XML schemas and word
> docs is not necessary and that we should be encoding all information
> about our XML interfaces in XSD. I would like to use XSD to specify the
> schema information and let it format the word docs/pdfs/html etc. Is
> XSL-FO up to the task? Documentation includes generation of sample XML,
> information about constraints, names, etc. I could probably do this in
> XSL, but I suspect that someone else out there has tried this and could
> tell me how hard it is.
>
> I know very little about XSL-FO, so if what I am suggesting is possible,
> where can I get more information about the actual tranformation from XML
> to formatted docs. That is, what tools actually format XML into word
> docs/pdfs/html . Also, if there is anyone out there familiar with
> cocoon, is it easy to do in cocoon (I would prefer not having two XSL's)?
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Kamal Bhatt
>
>
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