links for 2010-09-04

• schematron
  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.

  (tags: xml schematron schema validation xslt programming reference xpath testing standards patterns)
• Coding Horror: Vampires (Programmers) versus Werewolves (Sysadmins)
  Programmers are like vampires. They're frequently up all night, paler than death itself, and generally afraid of being exposed to daylight. Oh yes, and they tend think of themselves (or at least their code) as immortal.

  System Administrators are like werewolves. They may look outwardly ordinary, but are incredibly strong, mostly invulnerable to stuff that would kill regular people — and prone to strange transformations during a moon "outage".

  (tags: sysadmin toread programming admin developers)

(Possibly) related posts:

1. links for 2010-12-27