XML Conferences #3: XML DEVCON

Related link: http://www.sellsbrothers.com/conference/

I didn't go the Sells conference, but apparantly Daniel Cazzulino gave a good talk All about Schmematron. The conference home page has URLs of blogs discussing the papers, which is an excellent idea.

Thinking Out Loud has a very interesting dialog on which Enterprise Integration Patterns message pattern Schematron fits into: command, event or document.

Good quote at the end: "XML Schema as it exists in .NET today definitely doesn't cut it. The validation error messages tend to not be useful, and so we have to do some level of home grown validation. The simplest I could get that was to have boolean xpath assertions and associated validation error messages, and the implementation started looking a lot like a trivial schematron, e.g. pattern down, or maybe even just rule down."

If we all start to use standard Schematron, rather than home-made languages, we gain explainability, existing implementations, and (this is a very underrated thing) we get the buffer zone of a next layer of features such as patterns, diagnostics, flags and phases which don't bother us if we don't use them, but which mean we are not in a fix when we suddenly need more than the simple assertions.

Dropped Packets was disappointed that Schematron is not a gigantic robot.

(Whew...nothing more to report about conferences!)