xml-dev - Re: XML Schemas: Best Practices

[Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@rpbourret.com>]

There are two obvious disadvantages to the Chameleon design:

1) Name collisions. If any of the chameleon components collide with
components you are defining/declaring in your schema, you need
namespaces to disambiguate them.

2) Code reuse. Any standard code written for the chameleon components
might need to be rewritten for each schema in which those components are
included. An example of such code could be code to create Java objects
for the data in the chameleon components.

I also have an uneasy feeling that standard resources (schema,
documentation, etc.) which might be located on the Web based on
namespace URL won't be locateable because there is no namespace URL.
(This is not meant to start another discussion about whether this is a
good thing to do. Regardless of how such materials are located, they are
likely to be *identified* by namespace URI, so I'm not sure if there's
an issue if the URI keeps changing.)

-- 
Ronald Bourret
Programming, Writing, and Training
XML, Databases, and Schemas
http://www.rpbourret.com