Re: Another viewpoint on validation

On Mon, 2012-04-09 at 14:12 +0200, Jeremias Maerki wrote:
[...]

> So, if you can't use the formatter itself to do that check, the
> formatter/implementor must provide some sort of profile file describing
> what the formatter can do and a separate validator product needs to
> interpret that profile and apply it against the given FO. Big task.

Some parts are hard (and may not in fact be machine-processable in any
useful way) and other parts are likely to be straight forward.

For XQuery (a much more complex language) processors are required to
supply a natural-language conformance statement, but in XQuery 3 we're
introducing the ability for an XQuery file to say which optional
features it needs, or to disallow optional features, so that you can
test it for portability -- if you disallowed feature F and then you make
use of it, the implementation must report an error.  Of course, that's
only as good as the implementations, so we'll see.
[...]

We had planned to extend the expression language, and that would likely
make it harder (or impossible) for regular-expression-based validation
like XSD or RNG... for XQuery there's an XML-based syntax for the
expression language, and people can convert to that and validate, but I
don't think it helps for syntax-directed editing.

> > Note that now 'we' are the spec writers?
> 
> Uhm, I thought it's the W3C WG that make up the actual spec writers, not
> the PPL community group. I can't currently commit enough time to join
> the XPPL WG.

Not enough other people had time to join the XPPL WG, not even an hour a
week. So the work has stopped, and as chair of it, I'm looking for other
ways forward.

Best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Monday, 9 April 2012 18:02:44 UTC