It has been a sketchy time for Schematron fans. Rick Jelliffe, the father of Schematron has had pressing matters that have prevented him from putting much work into Schematron for a while. Many questions still remain about the technology specification, and alas, there appears to be no place to keep discussions going on these and other matters (the mailing list on SourceForge appears to be defunct, with even the archives giving a 404. Here are some notes on recent Schematron developments I've come across.
I wasn't paying enough attention and I just came across the new Schematron Web site. Launched in February, it supersedes the old Academia Sinica page. Some the content was copied without much editing from the older site. The overview says "The Schematron can be useful in conjunction with many grammar-based structure-validation languages: DTDs, XML Schemas, RELAX, TREX, etc.", but RELAX and TREX were combined into RELAX NG years ago. Of greater personal interest is the fact that it carries over a bad link to my old Schematron/XSLT article. As I've corrected several times on the mailing list, that article is "Introducing the Schematron". Schematron.com also does not list two of my more recent articles:
- "A hands-on introduction to Schematron"—a friendly tutorial by step-by-step examples (free registration required)
- "Discover the flexibility of Schematron abstract patterns"—an introduction to what I think is Schematron's most powerful and least appreciated features
Schematron.com does, however, include an entire page on ISO Schematron, including some sketchy updates I'm hoping to follow up on.
G. Ken Holman told me he created a modified version of the Schematron 1.5 reference XSLT implementation that allows the context of assertions to be attributes, not just elements. You can find his version linked from this message. I did point out to him that Scimitar (part of Amara) supports attributes as context, and overall attempts to be a fast and complete ISO Schematron implementation.