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John,
Before slinging around broad assertions such as this, you should check your facts.
Many people experienced problems with the original XBRL 2.0 schemas that were released in 2001. These schemas contained an ambiguous content model, though at the time of release not all XML Schema tools noticed or cared. Subsequently, more tools did notice, the problem was reported to XBRL International, a fix was developed and published as XBRL 2.0a in 2002.
XBRL 2.1, which was published as a recommendation at the end of 2003, comes with an extensive conformance suite of tests, all of which are built upon the foundation of XML Schema validation. As someone who has been involved in the design of XBRL since 1999, I can say from personal experience that XML schema validation for every kind of XBRL document has always been a goal since we dropped DTDs in favor of XML Schemas in going from 1.0 to 2.0 of the core spec.
One of the frustrations of of the XBRL design team has been the inconsistency with which XML Schema has been implemented in commercial and academic tools. XBRL relies heavily on substitution groups in XML Schema. Support for this feature is spotty at best in some products.
I can't speak directly to your problem using Xerces, but if you had to use "other tools", were they other tools that claimed to do XML Schema validation or not? There is an implicit acknowledgement in your statement that different tools reach different conclusions because they implement the XML Schema spec differently. That is not a problem that can be laid at the feet of any spec, XBRL, SVG, or anyone else, that is trying to build on top of XML Schema.
Complaints about processing problems that are sent to the xbrl-public group on Yahoo are always answered promptly (as are most mesages!). XBRL members have met with product development groups on problems with specific products, and have gotten assurances in some cases that the problems will be fixed in the next release.
Your further comments about XBRL and XML say more about the author than the subject. What tool are you using that rejects any XBRL document (to be precise, from the 2.1 conformance suite) as not well-formed XML? Our team at KPMG constantly processes XBRL 2.0a and 2.1 documents using commercial XSL tools in both Microsoft and Java based environments. If you can't do as much, upgrade your tools or your thinking or both.
Cheers,
David vun Kannon
KPMG LLP
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