xml-dev - Re: XML Schemas: Needs Marketing?

[Stefan Haustein <haustein@kimo.cs.uni-dortmund.de>]

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 
> I hope that we can find out during the Candidate Recommendation (or
> possibly sooner) whether the size and scope of the XML Schema
> specifications lead to a large number of less-than-completely-interoperable
> functionality subsets.

The problem is that you cannot just take a subset: concepts are
overlapping,
but you cannot take out one completely without needing some additions
elsewhere.

For example, you have the content-type that can be empty, which seems 
equivalent to an empty type definiton. But you cannot remove the 
content-type completely because you cannot express mixed content 
in the <type> definition. There was a nice suggestion on the 
schema-comments list of introducing <pcdata> inside <type>, 
removing the need of the content-type, but I did not find 
any senseful response on the list...
 
> I'm hoping that XML Schemas prove simple and efficient to implement, but
> (based on my readings of the latest drafts), I can't say I'm optimistic.

Implementing XML Schema is not really fum: You do more consitency
checks like "what, if content-type is empty and the type definition not?
Throw an error? What is the default for content type?" than
senseful implementation.

Best regards

Stefan


-- 
Stefan Haustein
University of Dortmund
Computer Science VIII
www-ai.cs.uni-dortmund.de