Map Markup Language is a proposed HTML vocabulary for maps. Although document validity is not a concept that can be strictly enforced on the internet, the documents in this directory are an attempt to provide guidance to map authors on what constitutes markup that is understood as being within scope of the MapML specification.

In principle, a MapML document should be parseable the HTML parser, because many of the elements are extended from the HTML namespace and are intended to have identical processing semantics to their counterpart in HTML apart from extensions specified in MapML.

In practice, no such MapML/HTML parser exists at the time of writing, and it should be good enough to encode a MapML document in HTML5 XML syntax in the XHTML namespace, so that Web browsers' XML parsers can be used. When such a parser is used, it should be possible to use the schema / schematron documents in this directory to validate certain rules of MapML and XHTML documents. The schemas / schematron files in this directory are intended to evolve as the concept of MapML evolves.

mapml.rnc (a RelaxNG compact syntax schema) and mapml.sch (post-schema validation MapML schematron rules) are intended to be applied in that order, to validate a "stand-alone" MapML document. Such a document would be loaded into an HTML document by the custom element, via a URL reference in the src attribute: <map-layer src="URL to MapML document goes here"></map-layer>.

Another scenario that is conceptually supported is to have an (X)HTML document that contains a element that contains one or more elements that in turn contain 'inline' MapML content, i.e. MapML vocabulary elements contained within the begin and end tags.

I couldn't get a version of an rnc schema for xhtml to work, so I have to be satisfied with validating a document that contains only a <mapml-viewer> element, with the correct namespace xmlns value for XHTML. See mapml-viewer.xhtml as an example.

To validate this latter type of document, I 'forked' the mapml.rnc document into mapml-viewer.rnc. You can validate mapml-viewer.xhtml and similar documents by using the mapml-viewer.rnc schema validation phase, followed by the mapml-viewer.sch schematron validation. These scenarios may not be perfectly adapted; please get in touch if you have a document that doesn't validate, but you think it should, or vice versa.

I use the Oxygen XML editor to create a global validation scenario for MapML documents, but you can use any engines which support those technologies, I believe.

PR