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Bob DuCharme wrote: > My guess is that it's a bug in XML Spy, which doesn't report nearly as many document errors as it should. same experience here. xml spy is a really nice interface, but the internals are less than nice, it is a pretty buggy product wrt standards conformance. > Whether it's known to Altova is a secret, because they won't release a list. (I've asked after they thanked me for submitting one.) altova declares everything to be a bug. i am pretty sure that, technically speaking, xml spy is alpha-level software (ie, not all features are implemented), but they refuse to give a list of unimplemented features. xml schema constraint checking (eg, integer ranges of simple types) was pretty much unsupported up to version 4.3. now it's handled a bit better, but it is still buggy. my personal favorite is a statement in their faq file about non-determinstic dtds and xml schemas (http://www.xmlspy.com/support_faq_ide_schema.html#q6_schema), which basically says "we think this part of the standards is not good and will therefore ignore it". deterministic content models are required for dtds and xml schema, and when after pointing that out to the support people with the references to the specs, i never heard back from them. i found it very weird to see a company declare itself as a "leading provider of xml software", and at the same time willingly (and openly) ignoring required parts of some of the fundamental standards they are claiming to support. > The Question "XML Spy has no problem with my document/DTD/schema but another program does, why?" is getting Frequently Asked enough to add to Peter Flynn's XML FAQ. Try parsing your document with a more robust parser such as Xerces and you'll probably get a better idea of the problem. my biggest concern with xml spy is not so much that it does not validate documents well, but that it is also very sloppy in reporting errors in the xml schema itself. this is pretty bad, because you may be releasing xml schemas which are simply wrong. this is not only rather embarassing, it will also lead to problems if you start to use them with more strictly implemented software. i often use ibm's schema quality checker (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xmlsqc), which is very good in checking xml schemas for correctness (xmlsqc does *not* validate documents, it only checks xml schemas for correctness). cheers, dret.
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