The Curse of Schematron seems to have lifted: this curse was that who ever worked upgrading the common XSLT implementation of Schematron 1.n to fit the new ISO standard would suffer from serious illness until they stopped work, at which point the illnesses would get cleared up. The curse first struck me, then Ken Holman who stepped up the plate next, then me again when I took up the bat again. I don’t know what combination of garlic and surgery has caused the unnatural oppression to vanish, but it seems to have worked. Thank God.

Which all an overly-dramatic way of announcing that ISO Schematron validation is not longer vaporware but I have this week put out a beta implementation at Schematron.com. (Err, actually even that is too dramatic: Uche Ogbuji beat me in releasing his version, Amaya.)

I have been using the schematron-love-in mail list at eccnet to coordinate bug comments and suggestions. Thanks to all the people who have been testing it. Dave Pawson is even writing a kind of For Dummies guide. A bird told me Eric van der Vlist might be writing something too. Over at XML-DEV, Roger Costello is compiling some kind of list of the kinds of constraints that people use Schematron for.

I have put up several conditions for it moving from beta, including passing a test suite. The beta implementation is only missing the ‘abstract patterns’ feature. I think it should stabilize into something reliable by early February.