Conformance Rules

This page contains the conformance rules for documents and publications as copied from the Open eBook Publication Structure specification. Rules that are not currently checked by the Validator are marked in red italics.

1.5.1     Document and Publication Conformance

This specification defines two named levels of conformance for OEB documents -- basic and extended, and one conformance level for OEB publications.

1.5.1.1     Common Requirements

A conformant OEB document (both basic and extended), or conformant OEB package file, must meet these necessary conditions, referred to in this specification as the "common requirements:"

(i) it is a well-formed XML document (as defined in XML 1.0);

(ii) it begins with a correct XML declaration (e.g. <?xml version='1.0'?>);

(iii) it is encoded in UTF-8 or UTF-16;

(iv) for empty elements it uses only the XML empty element syntax with whitespace before the trailing slash;

(v) it does not include an internal declaration subset; and

(vi) any attribute with a value of NMTOKEN, ID, or IDREF must be a XML name.

1.5.1.2     Basic OEB Document

A document is a basic OEB document if and only if:

(i) it meets the common requirements;

(ii) its DOCTYPE declaration, if any, references the basic OEB document DTD;

(iii) it uses only the element names, attribute names, and attribute values defined in this specification; all element and attribute names must be in lower case;

(iv) it uses element names, attribute names, and attribute values in a manner broadly consistent with intentions of the relevant descriptions in this specification and those of HTML 4.0 and the Dublin Core, with this specification taking precedence in the event of conflicts;

(v) if external stylesheets are used, then at least one stylesheet in each title set (as described in the HTML 4.0 specification), including any "persistent" set, must be of MIME media type "text/x-oeb1-css"

(vi) all style parameters specified within the document itself belong to the OEB CSS subset.

1.5.1.3     Extended OEB Document

[NOTE: The Open eBook Validator does not currently support checking OEB Extended Documents. You can achieve some of this by using the general XML Validator.]

1.5.1.4     Validity

OEB documents, basic or extended, may or may not be valid (as defined in XML 1.0) with respect to an associated DTD. However, all OEB documents must be well-formed XML 1.0 documents.

1.5.1.5     Publication Conformance

A collection of files is a conforming OEB publication if and only if

(i) it includes a single OEB package file that obeys the OEB Common Requirements listed above, and is a valid XML document conforming to the OEB Package DTD;

(iii) the manifest entry for each file in the publication specifies a MIME media type for the file (see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2046.txt);

(iv) each file whose manifest entry identifies it as being in one of the core MIME media types, conforms as defined for those MIME media types;

(v) the dc-metadata element contains at least one dc:Identifier and at least one dc:Title element;

(vi) the unique-identifier attribute of the package element is a correct XML IDREF to a dc:Identifier element;

(vii) any extended values specified for the dc:Contributor element's role attribute begin with "oth."; and

(viii) any extended values specified for the guide element's type attribute begin with other.

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