NVDL (NRL) support
Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2005 11:28 pm
With oXygen having excellent support for RNG and (now) Schematron, it will surely be a favorite tool for DSDL afficianados.
I'd like to mention that DSDL Part 4 (NVDL = namespace-based validation dispatching language) just came out last week in a preliminary request-for-comments version (downloadable at http://xml.coverpages.org/NVDL-FCD20050103.pdf). NVDL is largely based on James Clark's previous NRL work (http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/nrl.html). NRL has some existing support in jing, although it's not clear to me how much from just perusing the jing documentation.
I can well imagine how an editing environment like oXygen might provide very cool user-friendly support for interaction with NVDL schemas. For example, since oXygen now supports WXS, RNG and Schematron, I can envision extensions to the "assign schema" functionality that would allow using a friendly, menu driven/highlight-driven interface of some kind to assign multiple schemas in >1 schema languages to portions of a single instance document. This would then generate the appropriate NVDL. When validating, the environment could (using calls to and from Jing, or whatever the engine was) handle the piecemeal validation and integrate the display of the error messages in some clever, useful fashion (to be defined).
If you wanted to take on a huge project, you could write an original (?oXygen-specific?) NVDL dispatch engine from scratch to lie on top of existing validators and parcel out the pieces as appropriate.
Anyway, NVDL support is (probably) not "ripe" yet for actual implmentation in a product, but it's definitely something to keep on the radar screen and lies right in the market direction that oXygen is positioning itself in.
John
I'd like to mention that DSDL Part 4 (NVDL = namespace-based validation dispatching language) just came out last week in a preliminary request-for-comments version (downloadable at http://xml.coverpages.org/NVDL-FCD20050103.pdf). NVDL is largely based on James Clark's previous NRL work (http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/nrl.html). NRL has some existing support in jing, although it's not clear to me how much from just perusing the jing documentation.
I can well imagine how an editing environment like oXygen might provide very cool user-friendly support for interaction with NVDL schemas. For example, since oXygen now supports WXS, RNG and Schematron, I can envision extensions to the "assign schema" functionality that would allow using a friendly, menu driven/highlight-driven interface of some kind to assign multiple schemas in >1 schema languages to portions of a single instance document. This would then generate the appropriate NVDL. When validating, the environment could (using calls to and from Jing, or whatever the engine was) handle the piecemeal validation and integrate the display of the error messages in some clever, useful fashion (to be defined).
If you wanted to take on a huge project, you could write an original (?oXygen-specific?) NVDL dispatch engine from scratch to lie on top of existing validators and parcel out the pieces as appropriate.
Anyway, NVDL support is (probably) not "ripe" yet for actual implmentation in a product, but it's definitely something to keep on the radar screen and lies right in the market direction that oXygen is positioning itself in.
John
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