RE: [dita] Compound Documents

["Esrig, Bruce (Bruce)" <esrig@lucent.com>]

My position is that the content is acceptable and the contribution should be supported. However, a rewrite would help if time and resources allow.

I have sent editorial suggestions to the authors in a separate message (Tuesday May 4, 4:53pm Eastern). To summarize, I agree with Paul Antonov that our discussion should clarify the possible types of compound documents before explaining the particular forms that DITA supports and how particular DITA features can help.

Bruce Esrig

-----Original Message-----
From: france.baril@ixiasoft.com [mailto:france.baril@ixiasoft.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 1:49 PM
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita] Compound Documents


Following the discussion on compound documents, I wanted to share how I used DITA in a process to publish technical documentation from non-DITA xml sources.

I have to document Web Services (WS) in my current project. My basic sources of information are WSDLs and comments extracted from C# code (method, parameter descriptions) that are in a non-DITA XML format.

To document WS Operations I transform my WSDLs into multiple DITA reference documents (one for each operation and one for a general overview of the WS), and I add the operation and parameter descriptions from the C# xml documentation files. I also automated the process of buiding a DITA map from WSDL files.

I'm about to use a similar process for documenting the XML schemas used by the WS.

Basically, my point is that using DITA is a also good way to put together pieces of information from non-DITA sources. It could be interesting to propose DITA as a way to solve some of the issues related to creating compound outputs.

France