Re: [xml-dev] Schematron Question: proper way to express the text versio

[Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org>]

Roger--

Perhaps this is irrelevant to your point, but it seems to me that you  
should deal with a slightly more realistic example.  If, as I am  
assuming, these are military times, you're going to need to deal  
with, say, a meeting that starts at 2300 and ends at 0100 (the next  
day).   I mention this because I think, whether or not you use "is",  
"should be", or "must be" in this case, your proposed assertions are  
all expressed in terms of the *representation* of the time as being  
an integer (i.e., "greater than").  This may be what you want, but it  
seems to me better to express this using the term you used in your  
initial constraint, "after", as in "The Meeting's EndTime must be  
after its StartTime" (equivalently you could use something like  
"later than".  This expresses the semantics, whether or not you use a  
representation that strictly supports a "greater than" operator.

--Frank

PS:  You left off that alternative so beloved of government contracts  
and specifications, "shall be", as in "EndTime shall be greater than  
StartTime"

On Feb 12, 2007, at 7:44 AM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> Consider this simple XML document:
>
> <Meeting>
>       <StartTime>0900</StartTime>
>       <EndTime>1000</EndTime>
> </Meeting>
>
> With Schematron I can express this data constraint:
>
>        "The Meeting's EndTime must be after its StartTime"
>
> This is expressed using a Schematron rule:
>
> <sch:rule context="Meeting">
>
>      <sch:assert test="EndTime &gt; StartTime">
>              -- text version of assertion --
>      </sch:assert>
>
> </sch:rule>
>
> Read as: "In the context of the Meeting element, I assert that the
> value of EndTime must be greater than the value of StartTime"
>
> Question:
>
> Within the <sch:assert> element you can provide a textual description
> of the assertion (which I indicate above using "-- text version of
> assertion --").  What is the best way of stating the text version  
> of an
> assertion:
>
>          "is", "should be", or "must be"?
>
> For the above example, which of these is best:
>
> (a) EndTime is greater than StartTime
>
> (b) EndTime should be greater than StartTime
>
> (c) EndTime must be greater than StartTime
>
> Or perhaps something else?
>
> What is recommended?
>
> /Roger
>
>
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