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Document specification in markup language?

I'm not sure if this makes sense, so apologies to hand: is there a markup language specifically for creating document specifications? For example, if instead of giving people a Word Word document for a given document they need to create, give them a markup language specification of what the document should contain and how it should be structured. I think it is possible just using XML, but I wanted to know if there is something smarter that this:

<document>
 <chapter number="1" title="Introduction">
 <description>A short introduction about yourself</description>
</chapter>
...
</document>

thank

edit:

Thanks for answers. I think the above example is best said with an example. In order to release data to a third party in my organization, they need to fill out a security policy that contains some information on how they will ensure that the data is stored on their side. Most of the time, people download a Word template for it, fill it out, and send it back. I want to create an official specification of what this document should contain in markup language so that people can potentially build tools or other things around document creation.

I realized that the above example is not correct, its specification should therefore not contain any actual "content" of the document.

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5 answers


What you showed as a snippet is almost DocBook XML markup.

It works really well. The problem is, it's XML and painful to edit. However, there are good editors for this. I used XMLMind XML Editor .



However, you would be much happier using ReStructured Text and Python-based Docutils for this sort of thing.

RST is much easier to learn and edit than any other markup language.

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It has something to do with: The new 2007 Office file format is based on XML: Representation of Open XML Office File Formats (2007)



I've never come across the XML format as you described, but it can be built; probably your main problem will be corporate use.

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DTD or XML Schema

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Docbook if you want to use an XML solution. The good news is that there is a large community and many tools and examples. It's effectively a standard for you to be able to send such documents anywhere and expect people to be able to process. However, this can be quite tricky.

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It's one thing to create a format and provide that certain fields must not be empty for a document to be valid. Another is to check that a particular document meets this condition.

The former can be implemented as the word doc or with some of the XML solutions described here. Second, it's a software issue. For a short form, an HTML form with client-side or server-side validation might be fine. For a long one, maybe uploading a file with server side validation will work.

It looks like the form of the required data structures is already defined in the word docs. How do you intend to provide valid data?

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