>> Apparently detecting validation success 
>> or failure was left to whatever mechanism you use to invoke the parser 
>> and/or validator.
> 
> All that's required is there must be such a mechanism for a validating
> parser.

Yep. And certainly the various parser APIs (SAX, JAXP, the DOM3 document 
load operations) do report this.

I just would have been a bit happier, from an architectural point of 
view, if this had been made one of the properties of the Infoset.

Oh well. In an ideal world we would have developed the Infoset first, 
including all the afterthoughts like namespaces, then developed the 
schema language and XML markup syntax from that. Maybe if/when XML ever 
graduates from Recommendation to Standard (the semi-mythical XML 2.0?) 
we'll have the luxury of being able to do it that way.  Meanwhile, the 
advantage of developing from the syntax forward was that we were able to 
put XML into use immediately; the disadvantage is that it has a bunch of 
minor warts.

-- 
() ASCII Ribbon Campaign  | Joe Kesselman
/\ Stamp out HTML e-mail! | System architexture and kinetic poetry