ISO Schematron — free official version

The official version of the ISO/IEC International Standard for Schematron is now available for free from ISO for individual use. See http://www.iso.org/PubliclyAvailableStandards and seach for "Schematron".

The RELAX NG Compact Syntax schema for ISO Schematron is available here.

The RELAX NG Compact Syntax schema for ISO SVRL (Schematron Validation Report Language) is available here.

ISO Schematron — final committee draft

For convenience, the final Committee Draft of October 2004 of the International Standard for ISO Schematron are available below. These have only minor changes compared to the final version. Please prefer the standard, and only use these drafts if the final is unavailable.

The draft is available in four forms:

• HTML (Courtesy of Turn-Key Topleaf)
• PDF (Committee Version, using XSL-FO and stylesheet by James Clark, Ken Holman, Martin Bryan)
• RTF (Courtesy of Turn-Key Topleaf)
• PDF (Courtesy of Turn-Key Topleaf)
• RELAX NG Compact Syntax schema

This version is the result of addressing comments from national standards bodies and implementers. If the national standards bodies accept that the changes satisfy their requests, as is expected, this text will the same as the final International Standard, except for any minor editorial corrections*.

The draft is made available for comment, spelling corrections, and to aid implementers and users until the final International Standard is published in paper by ISO and other nations that adopt Schematron as a national standard, some time in 2005. This text is suitable as the interim reference for organizations adopting Schematron.

ISO Schematron now differs from Schematron 1.5 in four practical respects:

• A new namespace has been adopted using a Persistent URL (PURL), in common with other ISO DSDL languages: http://purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron This means, in effect, that all existing Schematron implementations need to be changed to support the new namespace (or both the old and the new.) However, it has the advantage, critical for a validation language, of increasing the chances that an implementation that accepts the namespace has been written according to the ISO specification. In the early days of Schematron, experimentation was encouraged and there are many partial implementations of Schematron 1.5. ISO Schematron will get a bad name if people expect the early implementations to have features apparantly promised by the ISO standard. As a consequence, the version attribute is now not needed to distiguish ISO Schematron schemas.
• In Schematron 1.5, there was a confusion between attributes providing names or titles for the important elements. Now the title element is always used for human-readable titles, and the attributes is always an ID (or key). This is a renaming, rather than an operational change.
• Variables (let) are now available on all basic elements, with scoping. These are also in Schematron 1.6.
• Abstract patterns have been introduced. These are also in Schematron 1.6.