RELAX NG

A Multipart Standard

DSDL is still a work in progress. It is a multipart specification, with each of the parts presenting a different schema language (except Part 1, which is an introduction, and Part 10, which is the description of the framework itself).

Part 1: Overview

This part is a roadmap describing DSDL and introducing each of the parts.

Part 2: Regular Grammar-Based Validation

This part covers RELAX NG; it rewrites the RELAX NG OASIS Technical Committee specification to meet the requirements of ISO publications. Its wording is more formal than the OASIS specification, but the features of the language are the same. Any RELAX NG implementation that conforms to either of these two documents is also conformant to the other.

DSDL Part 2 is now a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS); i.e., an official ISO standard.

Part 3: Rule-Based Validation

This part of DSDL describes the next release of the rule-based schema language known as Schematron. The current version of Schematron has been defined by Rick Jelliffe and other contributors as a language that expresses sets of rules as XPath expressions (or more accurately, as XSLT expressions because XSLT functions such as document( ) are also supported in XPath expressions). Its home page is http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron/.

Without going into the details of the language, a Schematron schema is composed of sets of rules named patterns (these patterns shouldn’t be confused with RELAX NG patterns). Each pattern includes one or more rules. ...