Re: What is the advantage of RELAX in comparison to Schemas?

[Bob Kline <bkline@rksystems.com>]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Inga Eckermann wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I am new to this list and have read about you mentioning RELAX and
> TRX. Why do I need these standards? On the RELAX-webpage is written:
> 
> Compared with DTD(Document Type Definition), RELAX has new features:
> 
>              RELAX grammars are represented in the XML instance syntax 
>              RELAX borrows rich datatypes of XML Schema Part 2 
>              RELAX is namespace-aware 
> 
> Is it not all included in Schemas as well?

The most significant difference (from our point of view, at any rate)
between RELAX and W3C's Schema spec is that the former supports
context-sensitive content models.  Schematron also supports this
essential feature, which allows you to specify that a certain type of
content is allowed for a given element only if the element's parent is
<X>..</X>, or only if the element contains a certain attribute with a
specific value.  Very disappointing that W3C decided to leave this out.

mfG/HTH
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline@rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com