Re: [xsl] Validating and Viewing XSL-FO Output

Subject: Re: [xsl] Validating and Viewing XSL-FO Output
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 10:23:57 -0400
At 2003-07-30 09:17 -0400, CHAUDHURI, Neil wrote:
I have written a stylesheet utilizing XSL-FO
...
I would like to do two very trivial things: validate my stylesheet
...
I have been told that the former is impossible
...
it is still XML and a stylesheet either meets the rules of its "parent" schema or it does not. Please offer some clarification on the extent to which XSL-FO can be validated.

There is no "parent schema" ... the document type definition for XSL-FO is in prose, not in any machine processable syntax. The same is true for XSLT.


A schema expression of constraints is only useful if it can successfully express all the constraints that are defined (otherwise you would only get partial validation, which some would argue is less useful than no validation ... at the least it could be misleading).

XSLT processors and XSL-FO processors need to act on your instances and these applications validate the correctness of your instances against the constraints expressed in the prose of the Recommendations.

Of what use is an external document type expression when the processor is going to validate it anyway when it acts on the document?

When I write a document model for my vocabularies, or use a model such as DocBook, this tells me my structure is correct for stylesheet or other processing because stylesheets don't do validation and processors and applications are made simpler if they can assume the inputs are already validated.

Without an expression language powerful enough to express the constraints, XSLT and XSL-FO processors validate your inputs in order to find the information they are looking for in order to implement the processing model described by the Recommendation.

Dave pointed you to the answer to your second question regarding processing your XSL-FO ... that will give you the validation you are looking for ... the http://xmlsoftware.com site is a good place to learn about available tools.

I hope this helps.

................. Ken

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