RE: [xsl] XSLT vs Schematron Decision: Sanity Check

Wendell and Phil,

Many thanks for your replies. Both very helpful.

Your point, Wendell, about Schematron's being a small enough language that 
expert users can learn to work in it or very close to it is highly relevant to 
this project. We have a small army of "business analysts" who write specs for 
our programmers. These specs deal with data validation rules quite extensively, 
and they tend to suffer from vagueness problems. Moreover, by the time a 
project is completed, the developers have often negotiated changes to the 
specs, which are not then consistently reflected in updates to the actual spec 
documents--rendering the specs pretty worthless over time. So I'm looking for 
ways to close up the loop a bit more tightly between spec and code, and if we 
can shift spec-writing, at least as it relates to data validation, into 
Schematron, it would help us toward that objective.

It remains to be seen whether the project will be approved, and whether I can 
get the culture to accept Schematron in this way, but I'm hopeful. This 
particular document pipeline is currently implemented in VB6, and a commitment 
has been made to reimplementing it in C#, so I'm trying to argue that we can 
use RELAX NG, Schematron, and XSLT to do the heavy lifting for us, and perhaps 
improve our specification methodology and documentation in the process.

Thanks again for your input and your time.

Norm

-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Fearon [mailto:pgfearo(_at_)googlemail(_dot_)com]
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2011 4:53 AM
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT vs Schematron Decision: Sanity Check

Norm,

As Wendell remarks, setting up Schematron on .NET to use ISO
Schematron with an XSLT 2.0 implementation is relatively
straightforwards.

The code in this blog entry (I put up some time ago) shows how to do
this using C# and Saxon.NET:

http://sketchpath.blogspot.com/2010/06/iso-schematron-loader-for-
saxonnet-and.html

Phil Fearon
http://qutoric.com

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Wendell Piez 
<wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
wrote:

Norm,

I know it's a week old, but I'll concur with Eliot.

Schematron is so close to XSLT in a number of important respects that

the

fact that it presents a different vocabulary isn't much of an

impedence for

your purposes. (Really, in some ways it's just a wrapper for an XSLT
meta-application.) Plus, it's already tooled, saving you engineering

costs.

Products like oXygen make using Schematron a breeze.

As Eliot says, there are advantages that come from the separation of
concerns. In particular, expert users who are not expert in XSLT or

even

XPath (which is core in Schematron as well as in XSLT) can be useful
participants in designing and even maintaining Schematron.

Like XSLT, Schematron can be documented in line and processed in a
documentation pipeline. So there's no real difference there. In fact,

done

right, the same set of stylesheets could process both XSLT and

Schematron

for documentation purposes.

Finally, given the right framework, Schematron can be enhanced with

XSLT 2.0

logic (functions and templates), making it extremely powerful and

much more

versatile than ISO Schematron out of the box. You should be able to

set this

up in .NET assuming you have XSLT 2.0 at all.

It sounds like you have your work cut out for you. But the

architecture you

describe is sound, even "classical", in its outlines.

Cheers,
Wendell

On 10/13/2011 4:06 PM, Norm Birkett wrote:


Eliot Kimber [mailto:ekimber(_at_)reallysi(_dot_)com] wrote:


I would tend to lean toward Schematron on the principle of

separation

of
concerns, where the ownership of the rules for the data validation

is

likely
different from the implementation of the transformation rules.


A very useful point. Thanks, Eliot--and for your comments about

.NET.


Norm

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