OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   RE: [xml-dev] W3C XML Schema Test Collection

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]

Title: RE: [xml-dev] W3C XML Schema Test Collection
This is one area where Schematron shines. The schema author can define the diagnostic messages to present to the user. Schematron seems to be the only schema language that is actually designed to be useful to document authors. Other schema languages just focus on being a formalized language for expressing constraints without any focus on usability aspects -- especially for documents that are in the process of being constructed.
 
I'm not sure that standardized error messages are the solution, though. I don't think a large committee will solve this problem well. I think vendors need to put more effort into having more friendly and useful error messages. This *can* be done. C++ compilers are notorious for their obtuse error messages, but I have used compilers (Metrowerks comes to mind) that do a far better job of providing clear, useful error messages than other vendors' compilers. XML Schema may not help, here, but that's no excuse for some of the obtuse error messages that many validators emit. They won't be able to do as well as Schematron, but they could do far better than they currently do if the vendors/developers simply made the committment to address this.
 
However, I will say that I think it would be great if we had some lightweight standards for specific annotations that could be used to support tools -- e.g. tooltip text, diagnostic messages for invalid constructs, and XLinks pointing to documentation. It would be great to have interoperable ways of leveraging schemas more fully to drive tools, and in a way that is genuinely useful to users who often won't be XML or schema experts.
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Griffin [mailto:Rob.Griffin@oz.quest.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 2:31 PM
To: Jonathan Robie; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] W3C XML Schema Test Collection

Jonathan,

I'd also like to suggest that the XML Schema WG produce
a list of recommended error messages for validator authors.

I realize that this is a very big job, and it's hard to
produce a complete list, but it would be very helpful if
all conforming validators emitted the same message for the
same error. Perhaps a starting point would be to ask
validator authors to list the error messages they use
together with the circumstances that trigger them.

I'm currently trying to implement XML Schema using Xerces
and some of the messages are very obscure, and from some
of the postings on this topic it appears the same error
can produce error messages that have vastly different
levels of meaning.

Apologies to the list if this mail appears in HTML format.
We are using Exchange and it puts all e-mail into HTML format!
We are waiting on an upgrade to fix this.
 
Regards,

Rob Griffin
Quest Software

E-mail: Rob.Griffin@oz.quest.com
Web site: http://www.quest.com 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@softwareag.com]
> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 1:36 AM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: [xml-dev] W3C XML Schema Test Collection
>
>
> Executive summary:
>
> 1. XML Schema test suites exist, and are being maintained by
> the W3C. This
> may be one of our best points of leverage.
> 2. The public is encouraged to add cases to the test suites
> 3. Some test results are available online for various products
>
> Here are the details:

[snip]





 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS