Re: [xml-dev] Graphical DTD/XSD Viewer

On Feb 10, 2011, at 6:28 AM, Michael Kay wrote:

> On 10/02/2011 10:45, Stephen Green wrote:
>> I reckon schema designers / architects should all have access to or
>> possess at least a
>> couple of these graphical tools.
> 
> 
> Michael Sperberg-McQueen has produced an XSLT stylesheet (suitable for use client-side in a browser) that displays an XSD schema document as a hyperlinked HTML document. It works particularly well when XHTML annotations have been used to document the schema. It's probably the best tool I know of for presenting a schema to users. Unfortunately I have a copy but don't know the original URL - I'm sure it would be possible to find out.

OK, Mchael, sometimes I can take a hint.

The stylesheet itself is publicly accessible from the W3C server at

    http://www.w3.org/2008/09/xsd.xsl

A few schema documents on the W3C server include an XML stylesheet
instruction pointing to this stylesheet; see, for example, the schema 
document for SML, the Service Modeling Language, at

    http://www.w3.org/2008/11/sml-schema.xsd

Some browsers, however, will refuse to process a document from one
domain using a stylesheet from another domain (on the grounds that
it represents a form of cross-site scripting and thus a security risk -- 
it would require more imagination than I have to figure out how to 
compromise a user's security this way, but security experts are paid
to cultivate healthy paranoia).  One way to apply the stylesheet to a 
schema document (without copying either the stylesheet or the schema 
document or both to a server you control) is to use the W3C's
XSLT server at 

    http://www.w3.org/2005/08/online_xslt/

and provide the URI of the stylesheet and the schema document.

The stylesheet is covered by the W3C license (for reasons I
no longer fathom, it's the Document License, not the Software 
License) so it is available for copying and revision; if anyone makes
improvements to it, I'd be happy to hear about them.

One final note:  owing to a long-standing bug in Mozilla's XSLT 
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94270), the hyperlinking
of names within the schema document does not work properly in Firefox.  

-- 
****************************************************************
* C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC
* http://www.blackmesatech.com 
* http://cmsmcq.com/mib                 
* http://balisage.net
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