Validating Structured Documents

[eric.dunn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I am familiar with the existence of the validator program nsgmls, it is in use
here to validate SGML documents checked into a repository. While I am not
familiar with the mechanics of how nsgmls works or how to make it work (I'll
look at the documentation/resources on the web on of these days) I do understand
the principles and I am familiar with the reports that it generates.

What I was wondering was if anyone had developed a plug-in or script for FM that
could create similar reports. Seems to me it's probably a simple matter of
recursively looking at all the elements and checking all the various properties
and error flags. Of course I'm feeling lazy so thought I'd ask if anyone had any
insight, strategies, or had already done this first. The simple reason I want to
do this is that it's very irritating to validate a book with hundreds of files
only to be stopped at one file and then have to start over. It would be far more
productive to get a report and fix all the errors before validating again.

Ideally, the generated report would be a FM file with each entry a
cross-reference to the error. I suppose this would be easy for all elements that
have ID values. But what about elements that do not?

The other ideas I'm looking for is strategies to validate element and attribute
content. Are there SGML tools out there already and has anybody already
attempted this in FM? An approach I have though of is to use table of elements,
attributes and allowed values and to check content against the tables. A
database approach would be interesting, but at this point I have no SQL
knowledge so I haven't yet experimented with FrameScript's database
interactivity. What are the best sources to learn from?

Eric L. Dunn



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