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- From: Francis Norton <francis@redrice.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 15:08:33 +0100
Ronald Bourret wrote:
>
> Linda van den Brink wrote:
> > What I'm interested in knowing, is how sure are we that the w3c (schema and
> > other?) specs are not comprehensible enough, and that implementation
> > experience and rapid acceptance are being affected. Is it just a hunch we
> > have? A general feeling among people on this list? What's the w3c's view on
> > this?
>
> For me, it's largely a hunch. I'm smart enough to have waded through the
> XML 1.0 spec and written a DTD parser, but dumb enough to need to read
> most specs quite a few times before I begin to undestand them. I'm also
> in the target audience for the schema spec -- I'll (hopefully) be
> writing a processor in the next few months to generate database schemas
> from XML Schemas. So when I feel (as Miloslav Nic does) like a "10 year
> old child reading in general theory of relativity" and put the spec
> aside (yet again) due to frustration, I can only assume that others feel
> this way, too.
>
...
Just speaking for myself, on a good day I think I understand most of the
XML, XSLT and Xpath specs. I'm not sure if I'm in the target audience -
I'm somewhat responsible for having pushed us into using XML Schema for
specifying B2B messages, following a successful experience last summer
with DCDs for manual message specification. I'm not writing a schema
parser, though I have written a nice stylesheet for documenting the kind
of XML Schemas you get when converting DTDs using XML Spy (we had a
*lot* of DTDs to convert) and manually adding basic type declarations.
I went with XML Schema because I knew that schemas had to happen, and
basically I trusted that the W3C + Corporates backing it would ensure
that this standard would win out. But at the back of my mind is the
guilty knowledge that I still don't really understand XML Schema Part 1.
My tuppence worth - the more complicated the system, the more clarity is
required in the specification; the more features appear to overlap, the
more the rationale and use cases for the design decision need to be
documented.
Francis.
--
Francis Norton.
why not?
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