Nothing has been as written about and over-cliched as documentation. We‘ve all heard the positive cliches:
More documentation the better.
If a tag set isn't well documented, people won't use it.
If a tag set isn't documented, people will not use it consistently.
Interchange requires documentation.
Databases require documentation of ingest format.
There are negative documentation cliches too:
XML is self-describing. (HA!)
Documentation is too expensive.
We can‘t afford better documentation.
We are agile, moving too fast to document.
It‘s just a frill, stick to the basics.
Takes too long; we‘ll make it better in Phase II.
We don‘t need no stinking documentation!
There are also cliches that I believe in, because documentation is, in my opinion critically important.
Tagging systems need consistency, for both downstream processing and interchange.
We are told that XML will live a long time, and so it will, and usefully, if we understand what it means.
If there is not fundamental agreement on how something should be tagged, we are sunk.
This is why we document tag sets — for people, for instruction in tagging, for tagging consistency.