Re: Validating FO

On 01/22/2014 07:19 AM, Tony Graham wrote:
> On Tue, January 21, 2014 12:10 pm, Dave Pawson wrote:
>> On 21 January 2014 10:25, Tony Graham <tgraham@mentea.net> wrote:
> ...
>>> In terms of validation outside the editor, thousands of people manage to
>>> run epubcheck [3] on their EPUB files to do a multi-stage check of every
>>> aspect of the EPUB.  If one schema can't express everything about FO
>>> files, then perhaps users need a multi-stage checking mechanism rather
>>> that whittling FO down to what can be expressed in a particular schema
>>> language.
>>
>> Epub <> FO? Quite a different ball park.
>
> Running epubcheck --> happy EPUB producers and consumers
>
> Running 'focheck' === running epubcheck
>
> &#8756; running 'focheck' --> happy FO producers and consumers.

To take Tony's observation one step further:

While I understand some folks are generating FO other than from XML 
through XSLT, that's my focus.  I want to know:

1) the XML input data is valid and correct*;
2) the transformation creates the FO document I expected; and
3) the resulting output has the correct appearance.

Validate FO?  Don't care.  In fact, depending on the FO processor, 
validating the FO can get in the way.  I explicitly have validation 
turned off for the FO engines (Antenna House, FOP, and XEP) I'm using 
since I mostly process draft (read: incomplete) input.  I'm more 
interested in having the processor do the best it can and give me an 
error log I can choose to ignore than have pristine FO as input to the 
processor.

*As I told my students repeatedly, valid should not be confused with 
correct - DTDS and schemas can only go so far.  "Correct" markup falls 
into the arena of an application and the human editor.  That's why 
things like authors' guides exist - "yes, the schema lets you do that 
three different ways, but we want you to do it this way..."

-- 
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Michael R. Hahn                            Phone: 1-316-285-0762
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Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2014 22:31:15 UTC