Final Committee Draft of ISO Schematron

The final Committee Draft of October 2004 of the International Standard for ISO Schematron is now available.
This version is the result of addressing comments from national standards bodies and implementers. If the national standards bodies accept that the changes satisfy their requests, as is expected, this text will the same as the final International Standard, except for any minor editorial corrections*.

The draft is made available for comment, spelling corrections, and to aid implementers and users until the final International Standard is published in paper by ISO and other nations that adopt Schematron as a national standard, some time in 2005. This text is suitable as the interim reference for organizations adopting Schematron.

The draft is available in four forms:

• PDF (Committee Version, using XSL-FO and stylesheet by James Clark, Ken Holman, Martin Bryan)
• HTML (Courtesy of Turn-Key Topleaf)
• RTF (Courtesy of Turn-Key Topleaf)
• PDF (Courtesy of Turn-Key Topleaf)
• RELAX NG Compact Syntax schema

* The following editorial changes are expected to the Committeee Draft for the International Standard:

• Appendix C (non-normative): use a RELAX NG Compact Syntax schema instead of a DTD
• Appendix C (non-normative): use a namespace. Add text: All elements shown in the grammar for Schematron are qualified with the namespace URI: purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron
  In subsequent clauses, the prefix svrl is taken as bound to the Simple Validation Report Language namespace URI for exposition purposes. The prefix svrl is not reserved or required by this part of ISO/IEC 19757.
• Appendix C (non-normative): change element srvl:ns to svrl:ns-prefix-in-attribute-values to emphasize that this is an independent mechanism to the XML Namespace mechanism, which is defined on element and attribute names only.
• Appendix G (non-normative): the following German is better Ein Hind sollte ein Bein haben.

• A new namespace has been adopted using a Persistent URL (PURL), in common with other ISO DSDL languages: purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron This means, in effect, that all existing Schematron implementations need to be changed to support the new namespace (or both the old and the new.) However, it has the advantage, critical for a validation language, of increasing the chances that an implementation that accepts the namespace has been written according to the ISO specification. In the early days of Schematron, experimentation was encouraged and there are many partial implementations of Schematron 1.5. ISO Schematron will get a bad name if people expect the early implementations to have features apparantly promised by the ISO standard. As a consequence, the version attribute is now not needed to distiguish ISO Schematron schemas.
• In Schematron 1.5, there was a confusion between attributes providing names or titles for the important elements. Now the title element is always used for human-readable titles, and the attributes is always an ID (or key). This is a renaming, rather than an operational change.
• Variables (let) are now available on all basic elements, with scoping.
• Abstract patterns have been introduced.