Blogs

I see many job postings that ask for a person with skills writing XML transforms. The posts almost always end up assuming that such a person needs to be an XSLT expert. This need not always be the case! While it it is true that XSLT can be used to transform XML, there are reasons why you might want to consider doing XML transform using another programming language. My favorite language for transforms is Python.

Here is why I often choose to script in Python or PHP instead of using XSLT:

I have used my wsdl2dita Python script to generate DITA source files from the WSDL file describing CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standard), which is sponsored by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the same organization that sponsors the DITA standard.

Using the DITA Open Toolkit I generated a PDF file, which is posted on this site's download page. For those curious, you can browse through this PDF (also available on the Downloads page) to get an overview of the web services and operations that make up the CMIS standard.

One nice thing about publishing documentation on a Drupal or WordPress site is that it is easy to instrument the site to find out which which topics are being read and searched for by the users. Here is what we have seen in the last few month's activity on our content-rich model sites.

We have seen daily search requests from people looking for samples and examples. Both the garage and grocery shopping topics are popular.

People are interested in the basics of getting started with DITA. The various planning, tutorial, and "how-to" topics are also popular.

Here are some of the key WordPress and Drupal features that we use in our DITA-based information mashups:

WordPress:

WordPress 3.1.2 and Drupal 7 (our initial model information mashup publishing platforms) have the following common characteristics: