xml-dev - Re: XSchema: ease of use (design goal 5)

[Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>]

At 15:57 02/06/98 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
>
>>human beings will find them [XSchemas] painful to write by
>hand, due to their great redundancy compared to DTDs.
>
I don't this is necessarily true. I wrote a lot of XML Schemas for JUMBO1 -
all by hand (I do everything by hand) and didn't find them difficult. They
were of the form I have already posted
	<ElementType name="FOO">
		<Attribute name="BAR">
			<Type>CDATA</Type>
			<Default>#REQUIRED</Default>
		</Attribute>
	</ElementType>

By contrast I still make many errors typing in DTDs by hand (especially in
the attributes and the order of their components). I also find it very
difficult to remember the times when you need brackets in your content
models and when you don't. And there will be zillions of wizzy wig editors
to help. I bet I could beat myself typing a normal DTD if I used XSchema
with XED.

But - in any case - if the DTD is any *good* the thinking time is *far*
greater than the typing time.

So - please don't throw XSchemas away till we've come up with some :-)

	P.

			

>
Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)