not completely related, but the XML version is easier to read than the XHTML version. Maybe just a question of presentation of the markup.

The more I think about, the more I am convinced that Schematron is really well fitted to validate microformats.

Eric

Nice work. I'm not sure what can be done about the optimisations (there must be some neat way...) but re. the ambiguities - the general µF strategy is to avoid clashes by prior agreement, so I would think is how the "fn" issue could be dealt with - tweaking the specs/profiles as needed. (Hoping to have a play with Schematron later ;-)

PS. I've just been looking at the specs around the "fn" issue, it doesn't seem ambiguous. Use of hCard inside hReview is encouraged, but I would imagine some kind of stack for context would be enough - er, but what about interleaving..?

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview

The ambiguity issue arises when different microformats reuse class values. Consider the case where you're looking through a document for hReview markup. If you find an "fn", it might be because you're in an "item" in the "hreview" or it might be because you're inside some "hcard" (which might or might not be inside the "hreview"). You can't tell what kind of "fn" it is without looking around.

Could the XSLT step be avoided by using a custom datatype that took the class name as a parameter and accepted any list of tokens that contains the class name? Something like:

attribute class {
    foo:class {
        name = 'vevent'
    }
}

…which would match class='foo vevent bar' but would not match class='foo bar'.

Also, how did you decide what to write in the schemas? I tried to extract conformance criteria from the hCalendar and hCard spec, but I did not find any criteria to extract.

    element * {
        attribute class {
            xsd:token { pattern = "(.+\s)?foo(\s.+)?" }
        }
    }

I have written a more detailed explanation of the reason why RELAX NG cannot be used to validate microformats, how Schematron could be used and how Schematron schemas could be generated from your RELAX NG schemas.

Hi Norm. I read this a while back, but it didn't click until now that what you've done here is what I described in my blog post on Domain Specific Intermediate Languages. In my case, I was working from XMI (UML in XML), which is not much less generic than an HTML microformat. Looks like we both came to the same conclusion (as did Sean McGrath in his CSW XML Summer School talk last year) that an intermediate XML format is a very useful filter in processing data that is contained in an unconstrained, generic format.