At the beginning of this exercise we considered two alternative designs: the validator could run as a generic XSLT stylesheet taking its rules dynamically from the SCM input document, or it could be a custom XSLT stylesheet generated from the SCM input document and dedicated to doing validation against this particular schema.

Both approaches have potential advantages, but we chose the first on the grounds of simplicity. As we will see later, there are some technical challenges where the second approach might have afforded a solution.