Overview
The Schematron differs in basic concept from other schema languages in that it not based on grammars but on finding tree patterns in the parsed document. This approach allows many kinds of structures to be represented which are inconvenient and difficult in grammar-based schema languages. If you know XPath or the XSLT expression language, you can start to use The Schematron immediately.
And it has free and open source implementations available. The Schematron is trivially simple to implement on top of XSLT and to customize. (There are also implementations in Python and Perl)
The Schematron allows you to develop and mix two kinds of schemas:
- Report elements allow you to diagnose which variant of a language you are dealing with.
- Assert elements allow you to confirm that the document conforms to a particular schema.
The Schematron is based on a simple action:
- First, find a context nodes in the document (typically an element) based on XPath path criteria;
- Then, check to see if some other XPath expressions are true, for each of those nodes.
The Schematron can be useful in conjunction with many grammar-based structure-validation languages: DTDs, XML Schemas, RELAX, TREX, etc. Indeed, Schematron is part of an ISO standard (DSDL: Document Schema Description Languages) designed to allow multiple, well-focussed XML validation languages to work together. You can even embed a Schematron schema inside an XML Schema <appinfo> element or inside a RELAX NG schema!