Inasmuch as the Antenna House meetup is back this year at the XML Prague 2017 ‘Unconference Day‘ with twice as much time as last year plus I’m teaming up with Andrew Sales for a Schematron Users Meetup, that makes two sessions at the Unconference Day with which I’m involved.
The two-part Antenna House meetup is “XSL-FO, CSS and Paged Output“:
Part 1 – A brief review with attendees of the highlights from Antenna House product releases and developments during the past 12 months. These include:
- PDF/UA output for improved accessibility
- Improved graphic support
- All-new interface for submitting jobs over the web
- Improved DITA support from updated PDF5-ML DITA-OT plugin
An opportunity for users to list features that they would like to see in future releases of the XSL-FO and CSS formatter.
Part 2 – Interactive focus on XSL-FO, CSS and the page – attendees will be asked in advance to come with examples and for ideas on additional topics they would like to discuss.
I’m organising the Schematron Users Meetup because focheck needs Schematron to continue to be available. This session is going for broad rather than deep coverage of Schematron:
Schematron is widely used, and every XML conference probably has at least one conference presentation that mentions Schematron. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, Schematron users seldom get a broad overview of the state of Schematron or get to hear about more than one or two case studies of Schematron in action. Conversely, people who don’t know Schematron seldom get the introduction to Schematron that they need in order to understand why other people are using it and why it features in conference presentations.
This session provides the missing pieces:
- Short overview of Schematron, its origins, how it works, and why it is useful
- Overview of implementations
Schematron is usually associated with XSLT, but it has been implemented in XQuery and is used with XML databases. This segment provides an overview of available implementations. - Update on ISO Schematron
ISO Schematron (2nd Edition) was standardized in early 2016 and became free (as in beer) later in 2016. It is likely that few people are aware of the update and that fewer still are aware of the changes between editions. Presented by Andrew Sales, current ISO Project Editor for Schematron. - Schematron Quick Fixes
Overview of this useful adjunct to Schematron that is being standardized by a W3C
Community Group. - Testing Schematron
How can you know that your Schematron is complete and correct? This portion looks at
how to test Schematron, including STF by Tony Graham and the ideas behind sutf by
Jirka Kosek. - Multilingual Schematron
ISO Schematron defines a mechanism for multilingual schemas using sch:diagnostic. The standard XSLT implementation presents every translation of a message, but recent oXygen versions present only one translation based on the user’s language preference. Separately, the open source OmegaT translation tool can translate Schematron files, making it possible to have per-language versions of your Schematron that are translated as part of your general translation workflow. - Lightning talks/demonstrations
Short presentations by Schematron users about how they use Schematron and SQF. - Q&A discussion
General round-the-room discussion about aspects of Schematron and its use that were or weren’t covered by the previous segments.
So if you’re in Prague on Thursday, 9 February, and looking for something interesting to fill your morning, your problem is solved!