Invalid intermediate results

Hi everyone,

I've recently started learning xproc and as a learning task I've chosen to rewrite/stepify a monolithic xslt-stylesheet. Now, I'm wondering how you should deal with invalid intermediate results: Say, I'm going from markdown to jats xml using pandoc, but the xml produced by pandoc is not perfect and I need a couple of steps to produce the correct and valid (!) result. The intermediate steps consists mainly of renaming elements and moving them around. Most of the intermediate versions won't be valid as they use elements that aren't valid JATS.

How would you deal with that situation (that we produce invalid xmls along the way)? Just ignore it? (Which would be what I currently do since I mostly care about the final document and not so much about interdiary files.)

Best,
Denis