I associate the idea of “Islands of Validity” with W3C’s esteemed Dave Raggett: IIRC he proposed it to describe where you stick some domain specific chunks of XML into an HTML document: you don’t need to validate the HTML, because …well… HTML, but you may want to describe your chunks…
...What is the difference between Schematron’s Role and Flag attributes?
A question recently came up on the difference between the @role attribute and the @flag attribute in Schematron. Both these attributes provide extra information that can be found in the SVRL (Schematron Validation Report Language) result of a validation. The @role attribute lets you provide extra information about the local…
...What’s in Java 11 for XML Developers?
Java is (by most counts) the most popular server-side platform. Oracle have moved releases to a regular six-monthly update, and the most recent is Java 11. Seven months ago I wrote What’s in Java 10 (and 9) for XML Developers?, so here is the update. There are no real changes…
...Standard Severity Levels with Schematron @role
Each assert or report element (and, in fact, rules, patterns, etc) can have a role attribute. The intention of this attribute is to allow the assertion etc to be categorized, and the prime categorization we might use is severity. So rather than validation being just either too-simple binary YES/NO, or…
...Will the Circle be Unbroken? Now the Wheel of Life crushes JSON too…
Technologies come and go, and technologies that don’t change die! That is was the lesson of SGML, where XML took over because the standards process actively worked to stifle change. And it was the lesson of XML, where JSON took over the ephemeral web traffic because the W3C process couldn’t…
...What kinds of content models (as regex) do users of conventional schema languages use?
I really enjoyed the paper from IDEAS 2018 Practical Study of Deterministic Regular Expressions from Large-scale XML and Schema Data by Li, Chu, Mou, Dong, Chen. My interest comes from my attempts years ago to make an XSD-to-Schematron translator, sponsered by JSTOR. It worked as far as it went, and…
...The Most Common Programming Error with Schematron
Schematron is a small, simple language, by design. The complexity is not in the elements, but sloughed off to the XPaths. But if there is one mistake that I sometimes see developers make, it is this: people think that all the rules in a pattern will be tried. In fact,…
...What’s in Java 10 (and 9) for XML Developers?
Java JDK 10 arrived this month (March 2018). It has much less radical changes compared to Java 9. The general trend: In: JSON/AJAX, Docker, effeciency, security JavaDoc, unmutable collections, more support for charsets in API Out: XML-WS (SOAP), CORBA, Java WebStart, RMI (When I say “out”, some are just removed…
...Alan Turing and Tony Hoare on Assertions
Schematron is a language for making assertions about whole XML documents, that each part of various patterns must be present. Schematon (and the other XML schema languages starting with DTDs) are a little special in that they are geared for assertions to be made on large complex data structure, but…
...Common Markdown Specification: so when is it a good idea to throw theory out?
My astonished friend Nick forwarded me a PDF-ed version of the GitHub Flavored Markdown Specification. This is a version of the Common Markdown Specification with a small number of extensions. It came to 164 pages. You heard that right, 164 pages, for a spec for a small language. How could…
...Is XML only half finished? The X Refactor
The W3 Standard for XML is now 20 years old. I sent original of this post to the XML-DEV mail list suggesting a different vision for XML: reconstruct SGML’s power but as a definite pipeline of simpler stages, but without DTDs or SGML Declaration. (This version: 2018-02-13) Where is XML…
...Minor correction to schema for SVRL
I have made some minor corrections to the RELAX NG schema for ISO SVRL on Github and this site. (The Schematron Validation Reporting Langage is a way to produce the results of validating some document with Schematron in standard XML: it can then easier to use by subsequent XML tools….
...OOXML, I did it again! So where are the newest ODF and OOXML?
The most recent specifications for ODF and OOXML are available free at the ISO Publicly Available Standards website. They have both been substantially revised and augmented over the past decade. ODF For Open Document Format, the standard is split into three parts: ISO/IEC 26300-1:2015 Information technology — Open Document Format…
...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,…
...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…
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