At 2003-07-30 09:17 -0400, CHAUDHURI, Neil wrote:
I have written a stylesheet utilizing XSL-FO
...
I would like to do two very trivial things: validate my stylesheet
...
I have been told that the former is impossible
...
it is still XML and a stylesheet either meets the rules of its "parent"
schema or it does not. Please offer some clarification on the extent to
which XSL-FO can be validated.
There is no "parent schema" ... the document type definition for XSL-FO is
in prose, not in any machine processable syntax. The same is true for XSLT.
A schema expression of constraints is only useful if it can successfully
express all the constraints that are defined (otherwise you would only get
partial validation, which some would argue is less useful than no
validation ... at the least it could be misleading).
XSLT processors and XSL-FO processors need to act on your instances and
these applications validate the correctness of your instances against the
constraints expressed in the prose of the Recommendations.
Of what use is an external document type expression when the processor is
going to validate it anyway when it acts on the document?
When I write a document model for my vocabularies, or use a model such as
DocBook, this tells me my structure is correct for stylesheet or other
processing because stylesheets don't do validation and processors and
applications are made simpler if they can assume the inputs are already
validated.
Without an expression language powerful enough to express the constraints,
XSLT and XSL-FO processors validate your inputs in order to find the
information they are looking for in order to implement the processing model
described by the Recommendation.
Dave pointed you to the answer to your second question regarding processing
your XSL-FO ... that will give you the validation you are looking for ...
the http://xmlsoftware.com site is a good place to learn about available tools.
I hope this helps.
................. Ken
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