ISO Schematron

I've been hacking away at Schematron, documentation and (with help) implementing a missing piece. It's a lot sneakier than I'd realised, with nooks and crannies that take a lot of reading before the meaning becomes clear. Couple of bugs have surfaced which Rick is going to work into the corrigendum (wikipedia entry. When to use each I ask!) as and when. I'm liking it more and more as my understanding deepens. XSLT 2.0 is promising to be a good implementation tool, especially as it is now finally a rec. I keep frightening myself and finish up staring at the standard, or my stylesheets, in good old fashioned 'programmer not working' mode. Eventually something clicks and I'm able to move on. I'm just grateful it's not a 200 page spec. I'm reminded of the comments put out by the SGML for the web group when they first presented XML to an SGML conference. If utility and clarity are inversely proportional to size then Schematron should be a worthy winner.

I offered the Schematron stuff to O'Reilly, but it seems that Eric van der Vlist has his nearly finished. Ah well. Funny, he's been on the Schematron list for a while now and never raised a comment. I wonder if he's implementing it too? We'll see when he publishes.