Eric van der Vlist announced the release of Examplotron, a schema-by-example approach built using XSLT.

Examplotron uses sample XML documents to generate XSLT style sheets which may then be used to compare other XML documents to the example:

"Many tools (including popular XML editors) are able to generate various flavors of XML schemas from instance documents, but these schemas do not find enough information in the documents to be directly useable leaving the need for human tweaking and the need to fully understand the schema language. Examplotron may then be used either as a validation language by itself, or to improve the generation of schemas expressed using other XML schema languages by providing more information to the schema translators."

Examplotron documents provide examples by definition, and may also use an extra attribute, eg:occurs, which provides additional information about how instances may vary from the example.

The current version of Examplotron uses the saxon:distinct() function of the SAXON XSLT processor, but "examplotron might be easily ported to other XSLT processors assuming they fully support namespaces nodes."

Examplotron itself is written as a RDDL document, and includes both an Examplotron compiler and an W3C XML Schema documenting its single attribute.

Eric van der Vlist is an editor of xmlhack.

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