Literate programming in XML

Literate programming is a programming and documentation methodology. Its central tenet is that documentation is more important than source code and should be the focus of a programmer's activity. Literate programming facilitates this approach by combining code and documentation into a single, unified source document. One interesting aspect of this combined form is that it is neither source code nor documentation. Instead, a literate programming system provides tools that allow a user to extract the source code or documentation automatically, but neither of these extracted forms is ever modified. Using a literate programming system offers some interesting benefits for many programming styles. Because the combined format is machine processed to produce the source code, the author is no longer required to maintain or write the code in the linear fashion that the computer ultimately expects. This is clearly advantageous for top-down and bottom-up design strategies. It may also have benefits for more modern programming methodologies, such as Extreme Programming. Typical literate programming systems are quite complex. They are built on top of some underlying documentation system (such as TeX) and described in terms of the macros and other documentation markup required to describe an xweb document. However, it quickly becomes apparent that XML can greatly simplify this situation. By stipulating that the document