The Relax NG support seemed to be working for lxml, until I tried it with a complicated case: a modularized XHTML Relax NG schema.

Turns out the approach I was taking of turning an ElementTree tree into a Relax NG schema is only of limited use. Relax NG schemas often use include to load other schemas from the filesystem or URLs as well, and that wouldn't happen as by then any information of where the original XML document was is lost. I could find no way in the libxml2 APIs to retroactively supply this information -- perhaps I should lobby for its inclusion.

To make it work now, I use a different libxml2 API to load Relax NG from the filesystem directly. You can now supply a file object or path to the RelaxNG constructor.

I suspect the same problem will arise with loading modularized XSLT. I haven't gotten around to investigating that yet.

Update: After some discussions with Daniel Veillard, it turns out my assumptions were wrong, which is good. libxml2 documents do retain the context information as a URL attributes, so this means that it should be able to include the Relax NG modules. It doesn't however, at least sometimes. It works when I start the program in the same directory as the modularized RNG files, but it fails if I start it a directory higher. This may indicate a bug in libxml2 or a further lack of comprehension on my side; I'll try to write some sample code and take it up with the libxml2 developers.

Update (05-01-27): I've now tracked this down to a bug in the libxml2 library. My bug report.

Another update, 5 minutes later: Daniel Veillard has already fixed the bug in libxml2 CVS! It turned out that xmlCopyDoc was indeed not behaving as it should.