Examples of soft validation
- Identify potential problem spots in data with ad-hoc
constraint checking
- Locate all codeblocks with lines longer than a certain
length (say, 72 characters)
- Locate all list items that do not begin with an
upper-case letter
- Are dates within a reasonable range? do death dates
follow birth dates?
- Finding erroneous tagging invisible to the validator
- Find paragraphs with no content (for whitespace)
- ... Or other “legal” but wrong
workarounds
- Finding misplaced or missing elements
- Footnotes in the bibliography
- Is every figure referenced at least once?
- Checking referential integrity / authority
control
beyond ID/IDREF
- Are all cross-listings actually listed somewhere?
- Are all part numbers represented in your database?
- Are all values of <city> in
your gazetteer?
