xml-dev - Re: W3C XML Schema Questionaire

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

I join Jonathan in asking XML-DEV-ers to fill out his questionaire, and
commend him for his initiative. 

Michael Champion wrote:
> 
> From: "Amy Lewis" <amyzing@talsever.com>

> > Is *anyone* going to answer that it's okay to have "flaws"?   

Yes, because that person may be happy that the flaws are irrelevant to
their requirements. 
  
> Likewise, if the Schema spec goes to Recommendation status before there is
> extensive implementation experience by *independent* developers and *proof*
> that the independent implementations of the spec interoperate cleanly, then
> the W3C is essentially saying "it's OK to have flaws ... we'll fix them
> later ... but we have to get the spec out now [for some reason or other]."

The idea of the CR period is to allow extensive implementation
experience to tell. For example, Arnold Curt's project: I am happy to
report (unofficially, but as a member of the WG not paid by commercial
interests) that his feedback (like that of other developers) seems to be
being treated just as seriously as feedback from commercial developers. 

> A "flawed" standard (we probably used euphemisms such as "slighly
> buggy" or "not completely stable") was considered to be better than no
> standard.  In retrospect, I think we did the right thing.
 
Yes, that is a very important criterion: does the spec meet the actual
pressing need of the day?  What is the pressing need: is it to support
being able to define SVG, XSL-FO, XHTML, XBase, etc? Is it to support
e-commerce? Is it to integrate Java and SQL systems?   Is it to allow
types for defining user interfaces?

One can evaluate XML Schemas on general terms as a universal schema
language. But it is more important at this stage, IMHO, to evaluate it
in terms of its sufficiency for meeting the pressing needs of the day as
the bottom line.

Rick Jelliffe
Academia Sinica
Taipei

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