Lint Metaschema Definitions for Trailing and Leading Whitespace

[aj-stein-nist]

User Story

As a Metaschema developer, I want consistent, clean documentation of the Metaschema-based model definitions, and want them to follow a consistent style, including with use of whitespace.

Goals

• Add Schematron validation to detect and remove leading and trailing whitespace in Metaschema definitions
• Automate enforcement of it in the Metaschema repo's CI/CD pipelines in GitHub, and be reusable by the OSCAL repo or other repos

Dependencies

N/A

Acceptance Criteria

• All Metaschema website and readme documentation affected by the changes in this issue have been updated. Changes to the Metaschema website can be made in the docs/content directory of your branch.
• A Pull Request (PR) is submitted that fully addresses the goals of this User Story. This issue is referenced in the PR.
• The CI-CD build process runs without any reported errors on the PR. This can be confirmed by reviewing that all checks have passed in the PR.

[david-waltermire]

This can be done in the composition check.

[aj-stein-nist]

Per discussion with team reorganization, I will move this Metaschema issue off the NIST OSCAL workboard.

[wendellpiez]

This request is okay with me, but nothing is stopping OSCAL from having its own Schematron for its own metaschemas, as well.

To the extent there is a spec here at all, is it more or less reducible to XPath

string(.) = normalize-space(.)

which confirms that there are no runs of whitespace and no leading or trailing whitespace?

A check only for leading/trailing space could look like this:

string(.) = replace(.,'^\S*|\S*','')

Questions:

• which of these is preferable? only prohibiting leading/trailing ws, or prohibiting any redundant (no/op) ws including leading/trailing?
• which metaschema elements are implicated? Maybe formal-name and description?
• please confirm, we want this in Schematron in this repo such as the 'Schematron simple check', or a functional equivalent? (alternative being a Schematron to be maintained with the metaschemas.)
• finally - certain XML editors have a bad way of messing up whitespace in files being edited. When they do so, it can ordinarily be remedied fairly easily (happy to describe further).