Re: Are we losing out because of grammars? (Re: Schemaambiguitydetection algorithm for RELAX (1/4))

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

Joe English said pretty much everything I wanted to say.  Just one
additional comment.

Rick Jelliffe wrote:

> doesn't the presence of these tricky ambiguity issues
> mean that to actually understand RELAX (and presumably certain other schema
> languages)  requires a computer scientist not a data modeler?

If you're using RELAX for validation, it doesn't have any ambiguity
issues.  In this regard it is the same as TREX.  The ambiguity issues
only arise if you try to use it to "interpret" the document (that is
augment the information in the document by assigning each element or
attribute a label corresponding to some rule in the schema).  If you
just stick to validation, there's no issue.

I would agree with the sentiment that it's bad to inflict tricky
ambiguity issues on data modelers. Fortunately this is not inherent in
using grammars for validation.


James