Validating tab-delimited text files against an XML Schema?

Hi Folks,

I have a customer who has tab-delimited text files.

My customer writes:

    It's structured data, but it isn't XML.  I would still 
    like to specify the data using XML Schema, and I 
    would still like to validate the data as if it were 
    an XML document.  Is this reasonable?

The approach that I can think of is to write an XSLT program that transforms the tab-delimited text into an XML document and then validate the XML document against the XML Schema.

Are there other approaches?

/Roger