How come there is no Apache Ant xml schema definition or DTD for build scripts?

Question

Could please anybody explain to me why is that? I've been always using Maven and absence of xml definition for Ant build script is something that makes me searching through internet and documentation instead of one look at the xsd or DTD.

For instance it is almost impossible to find out whether target definition can have own property declared or not.

Answer 1

There is a FAQ for this:

Is there a DTD that I can use to validate my build files?

An incomplete DTD can be created by the <antstructure> task - but this one has a few problems:

• It doesn't know about required attributes. Only manual tweaking of this file can help here.
• It is not complete - if you add new tasks via <taskdef> it won't know about it. See this page by Michel Casabianca for a solution to this problem. Note that the DTD you can download at this page is based on Apache Ant 0.3.1.
• It may even be an invalid DTD. As Ant allows tasks writers to define arbitrary elements, name collisions will happen quite frequently - if your version of Ant contains the optional <test> and <junit> tasks, there are two XML elements named test (the task and the nested child element of <junit>) with different attribute lists. This problem cannot be solved; DTDs don't give a syntax rich enough to support this.