Re: Relaxed - new HTML validation service based on RELAX NG + Schematron

On Aug 31, 2005, at 03:13, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:

> * Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>  * Doctype and schemaLocation are design bugs, because the document
>> that is being assessed sets its own rules instead of the document 
>> being
>> assessed being subject to rules set by the person assessing the
>> technical quality of the document.
>
> That's both good and bad. "Versioning" is a reality and its often
> possible to determine the defnite rules with respect to standards
> compliance solely based on the document.

I suppose there is merit to asking "What does this look like?" and then 
asking immediately if it is valid according to the answer to the 
previous question if the validator tells the user what schema it is 
validating against is and the schema is still provided by the user or 
the validation service and the document cannot covertly inject rules of 
its own.

> There may be stricter
> rules imposed at a higher level, but it is not feasible to require
> users to select a specific schema each and every time they want
> to validate something.

It can be a user interface annoyance, yes. That's why I made to 
settings bookmarkable in my validation service.

The main issue is whether it is useful to know that a document is valid 
according to some schema (for each XML document there exists [in the 
mathematical sense of existence] a schema according to which the 
document would be valid) or whether it is useful to know that the 
document validates according to a particular schema.

>>  * RELAX NG (Schematron too) fixes the bug: the RELAX NG validation
>> process takes two independent inputs: the document and the schema.
>
> This is no different from DTDs really, that most tools are only
> able to tell whether an SGML or XML document is "valid" per the
> rules in the DTD and the internal subset and such is an API bug;
> not all toolkits have this bug.

It is substantially different. With DTDs (as specified--I know there 
are tools that allow different things) the validation process takes one 
input (with possible includes).

>>  * If validator.w3.org adds RELAX NG support in response to what the
>> SVG WG is doing, it would be nice if the two-input nature of the
>> process was preserved and not regressed to the DTD ways by using
>> heuristic schema association.
>
> You would likely be able to use the Validator as a general purpose
> RELAX NG Validator but it's unlikely you will be required to select
> the schema for each validation. It's not just the authors who want
> to check a document, it's also customers of web design companies
> who want to check whether their produce proper code, and not all
> customers are aware of all the technical details relevant here.

So valid FooML is good enough if valid SVG 1.2 was ordered?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 31 August 2005 15:51:20 UTC