Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Newbie: Which validating parser for XML DocBook?

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

> From: Piet Seiden <ps@db.dk>
> 
> I'm starting out with XML, trying to convert existing documents using the
> DocBook XML DTD (4.1.2). As editor I have tried using XML Spy 4.0 but have
> not been able to validate anything, not even simple sample documents. Before
> this drives me insane, I would like to inquire here, if there is a
> validating XML parser known to work well with the DocBook XML DTD. The
> platform should be either Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD or Linux.
> Thanks in advance
> Piet.

One short path to XML validation is to download the Windows
binaries of libxml2 from:

  http://www.fh-frankfurt.de/~igor/projects/libxml/index.html

And then use the included 'xmllint' tool as follows:

  xmllint --valid --noout filename.xml

If you haven't yet put a <!DOCTYPE> declaration at
the top of your XML file to tell the parser where
the DTD is, you can instead use this form:

  xmllint --dtdvalid ../docbook.412/docbookx.dtd --noout filename.xml

to provide the path to the docbook dtd file.

Once you have valid XML, you'll probably also want to
download the libxslt binaries so you can transform
your XML using XSLT.  And of course libxml2 and libxslt are
also available in source form for Linux.

bobs
Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
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                                            email: bobs@caldera.com