Ok, I consider myself defeated concerning the way we handle the configuration file (See recent threads on fop-users). The Avalon configuration approach is very nice for the developer but obviously bullshit in terms of end-user-friendlyness. The attempt to overlay the configuration layout with an XSD is generally a good idea but with the current configuration layout, it's not a workable solution.
If anyone has a good plan to improve the situation, I'm all ears. I think the configuration file needs to be built based on an XML Schema and FOP should by default validate the configuration file (hard-coded in FOP) so the users get proper feedback if they try to feed FOP with an invalid format. But that means the XML Schema must be water-tight. On the other side, we will probably lose extensibility of the configuration file format. When someone adds his own renderer, for example, he can't just have his own config values because he can't change the XML Schema. So that may mean we probably can't use XML Schema to validate the file. But then, maybe we can define the individual renderer config parts as xsd:any or something like that and let each renderer validate its own configuration (either manually or using an XSD). ATM, I can't think of a good solution but apparently, we need to change something at some point. Any ideas, thoughts? Jeremias Maerki
