Committee Draft of ISO Schematron available

I am happy to announce that the Committee Draft of ISO Schematron (ISO 
DSDL Part 3)
has been submitted and is available for review at
   http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0524.pdf

I will also make it available at another website.  Many thanks to Martin 
Bryan and others
for typesetting it.  I specifically thank the open source implementers 
of Schematron,
and I would like to repeat that here. Unfortunately, ISO rules 
apparantly do not allow
individuals to be credited in standards, otherwise I would have made a list.

I do not foresee any changes for the Committee Draft, except for some 
housekeeping:
  * the names and numbers of the other parts of ISO DSDL will be updated
  * some logic symbols disappeared
  * the RELAX NG schema currently uses the compact syntax for 
readability, and will
  be substituted

Some of you may have recently seen Dave Megginson's recent claims that 
at ISO
people make changes willy nilly in standards the night before votes 
close. I wish
it were so: the current expectation is that this Committee Draft will 
take 12 more
months to become an ISO standard!   (A Committee Draft has a six month gap
until it can be voted a Draft International Standard, and a DIS has a 
six month
gap until it can be voted as a International Standard, to allow time for 
adeqaute
review by national bodies.)  In the case of Schematron, if I had 
standardized
it through, say, OASIS first, there would have been a streamlined procedure
that was more rubber-stamping.

There were a couple of minor last minute changes to ISO Schematron:--

* Following Daniel C's suggestion, I have added <let> expressions to
<schema>, <phase> and <pattern>.
 * Following UK requests, I added an @flag attribute to assertions, to allow
assertions to also set boolean flags.  If <assert test="x" flag="no-x">...
fails, then the validation results may include that the flag no-x has 
value true.
 * Following UK and Japanese requests the Schematron Validation Report 
Language
 has been added: SRVL is  the little language I made up for the old 
Screamatron torture
 tests, and can allow better  conformance testing between 
implementations (given some
 test suite. )
* Following Japanese request, there is a section on how to use 
Schematron elements
 in isolation embedded in other languages, so that people can just use 
<sch:assert>
 if that is all they need.
* <pattern> may have an @id and a <title>, rather than an @name
* more attributes have been allowed in more positions, to make the language
more regular: for example @see

ISO Schematron is specified as an XML framework language, in which there are
query language bindings. XSLT 1.0 is the default bindings, but other can 
(and have)
been made. It is defined as a small core language, with many ancilliary 
elements or
attributes that an implementation can ignore but which provide needed 
power for
some use cases. ISO Schematron has only 20 normative pages, plus 10 pages of
publishing matter and informative annexes.

Please report any errors you find to me. And thanks again to everyone 
for helping
ISO Schematron get this far. As several of you know, I have resisted rushing
Schematron into standardization even though this has probably hurt is 
adoption
rate and visibility.

I don't foresee that any substantive changes will be made to ISO Schematron,
based on all indication now. So I think anyone who has been holding off 
implementing
(or updating their implementations) to ISO Schematron need wait no longer.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

Editor, ISO/IEC CD 19757-3


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