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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). ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================
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