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

Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT vs Schematron Decision: Sanity Check
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:26:02 -0400
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@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 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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