I have a question for the community with regards to XML
based authoring.. In a hypothetical scenario, if you were to redo all your
documentation in XML in your enterprise (lets consider we create a custom book
format – that maybe extended from docbook).. which schema technology would
you choose to define your template rules - DTD, XSD or RNG/RNC format?
The main issues I want to consider in making the decision
is:
- Authoring tools available. Cause
non-technical folks would be authoring content and thus authoring tools
need to support the schema technology we use.
- Content Management Repository and
Storage requirements. (I don’t see schema technology being too much
of an issue here, except possibly validation content that is being
checked-in/checked-out).
- Developing publishing tools..
(mostly XSL, so I don’t think schema technology is an issue as long
as the instance document validates with the schema).
My current thoughts are:
- I’d rather use RNG/RNC
technology as my docset will exist for several years and would thus
benefit in adopting newer technologies at the start..
- However RNG/RNC has very
limited support in GUI based authoring tools to help tech-writers, I
think..
- I could use XSDs: One big issue
I had with XSDs were that we could not define our own entities e.g. “&compName;”
cannot be defined to output the Company Name consistently.. And we really
need this functionality.. (xinclude may be the answer)..
- Also with XSDs we can’t
use the internal DOCTYPE for each document and thus overwrite some of the
external entity declaration in each instance..
- DTD is safest in some sense,
but all new enhancements are being done in XSD and RNG/RNC technologies
only.. So it’s not the best idea to start a new docset with DTDs
anymore.
--
Rajal