Rick
Jelliffe has announced
the beta release 1.5 of Schematron,
merging code from different implementations to provide a more open, flexible
and powerful version of the rule-based schema language.
Schematron
1.5 uses the new architecture introduced with Schematron 1.3 and should be compatible
with existing 1.3 schemas. New features include:
- Same version works with both
namespace and non-namespace (Schematron 1.3 required 2 different implementations)
- Implements phases, diagnostics,
inherited abstract rules, value-of
- Better compile-time error
messages
- Extends the architecture to
make available more attributes
The new
release uses a "conservative subset of XSLT" and is still
compatible with XT -- assuming schemas do not use keys (a XSLT feature not supported
by XT). It also includes conformance tests and specifications
to be used by further implementations of Schematron 1.5.
Discussing the
need to add more features, Miloslav Nic thinks
that Schematron has reached a stable point where the project needs to rest for
a while:
I have feeling that the
Schematron achieved the level of complexity which is needed just now. Maybe
there should be experimental Schematron 2.0, but people have to have time to
digest the current one.
The
announcement comes while an active debate
is being held on XML-DEV to compare the differences and synergies between the
available XML schema languages.
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