Hi Nick,
Yes, a validator would help. The design of parcel xml makes that slightly tricky, as the definition of new Kinds would need to define the xml schemas. Each parcel that defines new Kinds defines a new namespace.
We could of course define an xml schema for the core items (Kind, Attribute, etc.). We could also define xml schemas for common Kinds in the framework (Blocks, WakeupCallers).
If you really wanted to go this route, I'd suggest making use of the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) format, version 2.0. It includes transformations from XMI to XML Schema and vice versa (along with UML mappings), and the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) supports automatically generating custom GUI editors for content defined via such schemas.
In other words, if I understand all this correctly, you can design an application model in a UML editor, throw the XMI of it into EMF, and then generate an XML schema for the application data, and a GUI to edit files according to that schema. So, at that point you're fully TLA compliant. ;)
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