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Title: RE: W3C XML Schema Test Collection This
is one area where Schematron shines. The schema author can define the diagnostic
messages to present to the user. Schematron seems to be the only schema language
that is actually designed to be useful to document authors. Other schema
languages just focus on being a formalized language for expressing constraints
without any focus on usability aspects -- especially for documents that are in
the process of being constructed.
I'm
not sure that standardized error messages are the solution, though. I don't
think a large committee will solve this problem well. I think vendors need to
put more effort into having more friendly and useful error messages. This *can*
be done. C++ compilers are notorious for their obtuse error messages, but I have
used compilers (Metrowerks comes to mind) that do a far better job of providing
clear, useful error messages than other vendors' compilers. XML Schema may not
help, here, but that's no excuse for some of the obtuse error messages that many
validators emit. They won't be able to do as well as Schematron, but they could
do far better than they currently do if the vendors/developers simply made the
committment to address this.
However, I will say that I think it would be great if we had some
lightweight standards for specific annotations that could be used to support
tools -- e.g. tooltip text, diagnostic messages for invalid constructs, and
XLinks pointing to documentation. It would be great to have interoperable ways
of leveraging schemas more fully to drive tools,
and in a way that is genuinely useful to users who often won't be XML or schema
experts.
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