The Proceedings of XML London 2017 don’t seem to be on their front page, but you can find them here (PDF). One paper that has really caught my eye is Hans-Jürgen Rennau’s Location trees enable XSD based tool. It seems to provide a great missing step in making XSD (W3C…
...How to make your markup language pleasant: linear and unfolding
Why is Schematron relatively pleasant to read, by all accounts, while something like XProc (or XSD) is relatively difficult? Both are small, specialized languages which I have used in large projects, and I have been trying to put my finger on why I like one but am hesitant about the…
...Validating complex text, embedded in XML without markup, in Schematron
Your XML documents have large chunks of text in some fixed notation: XPaths or JavaScript or dates that are not limited to ISO 8601 or even, because you are so perverse, JSON fragments. How are you going to validate that XML? You are not going to mark these up with…
...“Schemas do not imply any semantics of documents”
I liked this quote by RELAX NG inventor Dr Makoto Murata on a mail list recently. I thought it was really clearly put. Here is the exchange: C: The order of elements (in Schema X) {actually} seems to matter. M: The schema allows any order. But this does not mean…
...TEI P5 3.2.0 Additional Constraints, plus tribute to Sebastian Rahtz
The academic-focused Text Encoding Initiative is a long-running project largely lead through Oxford University. They have released their latest update to their P5 version, TEI P5 3.2.0 They now favour this One document does it all (ODD) idea, where they want to collect everything into a single document: metadata, text,…
...Alexander Schwartzman’s Quasi-Static and Quasi-Dynamic Constraints
Alexander Schwartzman has written a good article summarizing the lessons learned from using Schematron and DTDs together over multiple years for a non-trivial DTD. JATS Subset and Schematron: Achieving the Right Balance from the Journal Article Tage Suite Conference 2017 is now online. Alexander is mainly concerned about whether you…
...Testing Schematron using XSpec
So you have your Schematron schema. How do you make a unit or regression test for it, to demonstrate that it works (or has not broken)? The XSpec unit test framework now allows tests of Schematron schemas. Announcing this, Vincent Lizzi has a paper Testing Schematron using XSpec at the…
...Can I assert patterns in Java Objects with Schematron?
Schematron has been useful over the years for detecting patterns in documents. A simple expert system (multiple if-then-else changes) for capturing the constraints as human language, implementing the tests using XPaths to provide a context and then to assert or report on things that should be true at the context. …
...Lightweight inline schemas above structs?
The last thing I expect the world cares about is another schema language for XML! But the XML ecosystem has had a lot of challenges with JSON. XML comes from the markup world where your documents are made by domain experts not programmers, with the intention of abstracting away issues…
...Validation result caching using a keystore
Scenario: You have a messaging or distributed pipeline architecture for your XML documents. An XML document make multiple stopovers from beginning to end, and a document may be stored and requested multiple times in its life. Your documents go between different operations or groups under your roof, or comes from…
...Could Schematron be used for Content Completion in editors?
Over at XML.COM, Gerrit Imsieke has a stimulating article Epischemas: Schema Constraints that facilitate Content Completion. He wants to improve content completion in XML editors (where the editor automatically fills in the next step) given that many interesting types of documents have additional constraints to those available in a simple…
...XPath 3.1 adds Maps and Arrays, and new operators ‘!’ ‘?’ So ~ LISP ?
Scope creep in a misguided attempt to make XQuery as relevant to JSON as it is to XML? Or valuable additions that really make XPath and XSLT into dialects of LISP? Why not both! W3C XPath 3.1 came out in late March, and adds two features to XPath 3.0 in…
...Dream: XMON combining XML and JSON
To me it is clear that XML and JSON have complimentary strengths. And I would go further to suggest each needs what the other provides in order to be the most useful. It is not likely, but I put up an idea XMON on the XML-DEV mail list this week,…
...Making a Profile of a Large Schema with Schematron: Sugar-Free XSD
What do you do if you have to use an excessively large schema, but you only need parts of it, and you don’t want to open yourself up to a continuing maintenance problem, of updating your derived schema every time the base schema changes? Here is an example of one…
...Overview of Rust and Pony
I wanted to study some twenty-first century programming languages, open source and not coming out from a big vendor, and I picked Rust and Pony. Here is my potted overview of the features. Both Pony and Rust are compiled programming languages for highly concurrent applications, use C family syntax (like…
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