The IMT has always used XML Schemas for its documents, but as documented elsewhere on the blog, there are substantial problems with using this format. These problems have now afflicted the Mariage project; changes in the TEI P5 schema since the project started have resulted in our files being invalid against the current P5 schema, and our old schema also denies us the use of some attributes we now need (notBefore and notAfter on <date>. Regenerating XSD schemas from ROMA is problematic because Roma's native format is RNG.

So the Mariage schema, along with any other schemas based on TEI P5, needs to be rebuilt on a regular basis as P5 continues to change; and that means that it makes more sense to move to RNG for the project. To do that, we need to move the IMT to RNG, and that's what I've started to do.

The first stage is complete: I've generated an SVG 1.1 RNG file from the SVG DTD using Trang (in oXygen), and I've re-generated the IMT schema as RNG by uploading my ODD file into ROMA. Using only these two schemas (an explicit XLink schema doesn't seem to be needed), I've been able to validate an existing IMT file. The only change that needs to happen in the IMT files is to remove the xsi:schemaLocation attribute pointing at the old XSD file.

I'll now create a task list for the remainder of this process.