Sorry for the stupid question but how do we validate XML InputStream that are following an XSD? I've got something like DocumentBuilderFactory docBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); docBuilderFactory.setValidating( true ); //apparently useless cause it's for DTDs only docBuilderFactory.setNamespaceAware( true ); //this one seems to do nothing either docBuilderFactory.setSchema( SchemaFactory.newInstance( javax.xml.XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI ) .newSchema( new StreamSource( getStreamFromClasspath( "persistence_1_0.xsd" ) ) ) ); InputSource source = new InputSource( is ); DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder(); docBuilder.setEntityResolver( resolver ); docBuilder.setErrorHandler( new ErrorLogger( "XML InputStream", errors, resolver ) ); Document doc = docBuilder.parse( source ); if ( errors.size() != 0 ) { throw new PersistenceException( "invalid persistence.xml", (Throwable) errors.get( 0 ) ); } But even with illegal elements in the XML (well-formed though), I get no error :(