This is an ongoing project under ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 WG 1, developing and maintaining a multi-part International Standard.
The main objective of DSDL is to bring together different validation-related tasks and expressions to form a single extensible framework that allows technologies to work in series or in parallel to produce a single or a set of validation results. The extensibility of DSDL accommodates validation technologies not yet designed or specified.
Participation in the working group is principally by members of National Bodies. Voting in the sub-committee is done by country, not by company or individual. WG 1 participants meet face-to-face at international meetings, however the bulk of the work is done over the mail lists and by teleconference.
There are two DSDL mailing lists:
dsdl-discuss@dsdl.org - readable by all but restricted to posting only by accredited working group attendees (please contact your national body for details about participating; if you don't know who is at the head of your national body representation to SC34, please contact us at info@dsdl.org and we'll see who we can find for you). [mailing list archives]
dsdl-comment@dsdl.org - un-moderated public contribution (please join!)[mailing list archives]
The following documents are available to the public:
| Part | Title | Documents |
| 1 | Overview | Working Draft |
| 2 | Regular-grammar-based validation - RELAX NG | 2nd Edition ISO/IEC Standard (publicly available) |
| 3 | Rule-based validation - Schematron | ISO/IEC Standard (publicly available) |
| 4 | Namespace-based validation dispatching language - NVDL | ISO/IEC Standard (publicly available) |
| 5 | Extensible Datatypes | Final Committee Draft (2008-12-17) |
| 6 | Path-based integrity constraints | [cancelled] |
| 7 | Character Repertoire Description Language - CREPDL | Final Committee Draft (2008-01-11) |
| 8 | Document Schema Renaming Language - DSRL | Final Committee Draft (2007-07-16) |
| All you need to know about DSRL in one A4 page | ||
| DSRL tutorial | ||
| Materials to accompany above tutorial (ZIP file) | ||
| 9 | Datatype- and Namespace-aware DTDs | Final Committee Draft (2007-08-05) |
| 10 | Validation Management | [cancelled] |
| 11 | Schema Association | (see this W3C Note) |
Eric van der Vlist of Dyomedea has graciously offered a copy of his XML Europe 2002 Schema Tutorial that utilizes terminology being adopted in DSDL.
The following documents pertain to interesting and/or related technologies that could be useful background and may or may not end up being related to DSDL. Please post any suggestions you have for recommended reading materials and the URLs will be added here.
ISO DSDL Overview (XML Europe 2004 Presentation by Eric van de Vlist) http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xmle04/index/author/986dde2297ddffba1188805977.html
Namespace Routing Language (NRL) http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/nrl.html
XML Pipeline Definition Language http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-pipeline/
XML Validation Interoperability Framework (xvif) http://freshmeat.net/projects/xvif/