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Ronald Bourret wrote: > > "Simon St.Laurent" wrote: > > > > On Tue, 2002-01-22 at 03:04, Ronald Bourret wrote: > > > In documentation terms, RDDL is a reference manual and only low-level > > > people (e.g. TV repairmen) want reference manuals. Everybody else wants > > > a user's guide. > > > > Perhaps, but I'm not sure most developers want a 3400-page tome > > explaining (X)HTML, XForms, SVG, RDF, SMIL, MathML, XLink, and > > everything else that can reasonably mash together in the context of a > > web page, and I'm not sure computers want their equivalent of that > > either. > > But that's what you effectively get, regardless of whether it's in one > document or spread over multiple documents. I think the important thing > is that you need a summary document to tell you how each piece fits in. > > Going back to the TV analogy, the switch doesn't know it belongs to a > TV, so the switch documentation can't tell you that to turn the TV on > you turn the switch to the on position. All it can tell you is how to > turn the switch on. > > Perhaps the RDDL document for the root element serves this purpose. I think it would be cool if people got in the practice of having documentation annotations in schemas that have XLink links to relevant sections of documentation that explain the relevant portion of the grammar (as just one interesting use case). Envision this scenario: a user starts typing an XML document in their editor. They type the root element with the namespace declaration, and save the document. The editor flags the namespace, and indicates to the user that it is an unrecognized namespace. The user right-mouse clicks and selects a meny that says "Resolve Namespace". They get a wizard that connects to the net, downloads an RDDL resource, lists the associated resources to the user and asks if the user would like to download these resources and create a "package" for the namespace using these resources. The user says yes. After the package is downloaded, the user gets a content assistant that uses an XML Schema or RELAX NG grammar to indicate relevant choices to the user. The user sees an element suggested that they are unfamiliar with. The add the element to the document and put the mouse pointer over it. They get a brief tooltip with documentation from annotation in the schema. They want to know more, so they right mouse click on the element name and select "View Documentation". The application uses the hyperlink from the schema annotation and takes them to the section of the documentation that discusses the relevant element -- context-sensitive help enabled through the use of RDDL. This is the sort of vision for RDDL I'd like to move towards.
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