An XML vocabulary for error message documentation

Abstract

The documentation of software error messages has traditionally been a laborious and error-prone process. The documentation has been produced in a variety of file formats, either manually, or using special software to extract the desired information. Now that Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become a standard data format, it makes sense to store error messages and all related data in an XML source document. You can author the documents using standard tools, and software applications can extract the messages and other information from the document. Also, you can use standard XML technologies and tools to validate the XML documents and transform them into appropriate formats. Using the XML approach, you ensure consistency between your error message documentation and information displayed by software applications. This article describes an XML vocabulary for error message documentation defined by an XML Schema document. It illustrates how the use of an XML Schema document provides great flexibility for error message documentation, and powerful mechanisms for constraining document content. The article also gives examples from instance documents, and discusses how internationalized versions of error message documents can be handled.