Technical documentations in XML?

[Torsten]

Hi all,

I'm looking for a XML format for technical documentations. I know that
there are a couple of them like docBook, openDocument, openXML, ...
but I have a special requirement.
I'd like to add meta informations to each paragraph/table/figure e.g.
<para specialAttribute="descr.part0815.interface">
Description of the interface of part 0815.
</para>
Later I want to extract this paragraph with the specialAttribute by a
tool to use the content for some purpose.
And of course the document should be converted to PDF without these
meta informations.

Is there any XML documentation format available that supports this
functionality?

Are there tools (open source or proprietary) for this format available
that help the ones who a write these documents by e.g.
a popup window that allows to add this information to a selected
paragraph?

The persons who will write the documents will not have XML knowledge,
so a plain text editor like vi is not a solution.
WYSIWYG would be nice, but even an editor that can handle docBook or
whatever without showing the XML tags might be an option.

Thanks in advance
Torsten

 

[Peter Flynn]

Hi all,

I'm looking for a XML format for technical documentations.

DocBook is good for computing documentation, but of limited use in other
technical fields.

I know that
there are a couple of them like docBook, openDocument, openXML, ...
but I have a special requirement.
I'd like to add meta informations to each paragraph/table/figure e.g.
<para specialAttribute="descr.part0815.interface">
Description of the interface of part 0815.
</para>

Fortunately DocBook is massively customisable.

Later I want to extract this paragraph with the specialAttribute by a
tool to use the content for some purpose.
And of course the document should be converted to PDF without these
meta informations.

Write an XSL stylesheet to do this. Or write XSLT to convert to LaTeX.

Is there any XML documentation format available that supports this
functionality?

Lots. DocBook is just the most popular.

Are there tools (open source or proprietary) for this format available
that help the ones who a write these documents by e.g.
a popup window that allows to add this information to a selected
paragraph?

Any graphical XML editor will do this.

The persons who will write the documents will not have XML knowledge,
so a plain text editor like vi is not a solution.
WYSIWYG would be nice, but even an editor that can handle docBook or
whatever without showing the XML tags might be an option.

Unfortunately, suitable editors for the non-XML user are non-existent.
There are several excellent editors which hide the markup, but then the
user can't see what she's doing, and will try to put stuff in the wrong
place by mistake.

See my research and summary from last year's paper at the Extreme Markup
conference (http://epu.ucc.ie/articles/extreme06)

///Peter