Bloomsbury Publishing’s Content Strategy fundamentally centres on the question: How do we leverage the value of content most effectively and efficiently? The strategy becomes even more crucial when working with complex content models such as DocBook, TEI, and VRA, with their intricate relationships between elements, attributes, and content structures.

Our approach, which encourages early and frequent testing before integration into the deployed version of a schema, is a philosophy that helps identify issues early in the workflow. Smoking out issues early on is significantly less disruptive and complex to resolve than uncovering problems at later stages in our workflows. While this approach will likely increase the number of failures reported and might seem counterintuitive, each failed test provides valuable feedback, enabling us to refine the schemas and improve publishing processes.

Although we had existing frameworks in place to validate the integrity of our extensive Schematron schema, we identified a gap in the lack of structured testing for the RELAX NG and XML schemas that we work with. To address this, we decided to develop a test suite to verify and validate our customised schemas, ensuring that our content validation standards are met now and for any future schema modifications, for every stage of our content workflow.