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

[Bob Kline <bkline@rksystems.com>]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> Keeping up multiple documents to control a single instance is a
> cost, no doubt, but spreading a single ineffective control across
> multiple processes with different objectives is also costly.  
> Again, the case must be made for consensus and that is harder than
> to rule by fiat.  The problem is that when one attempts the monolith
> it is likely that acceptance and implementation may be sparser than
> if only the simplest and easily recognized agreements are made (this
> is Berners-Lee minimal victory approach).

We are largely in agreement, it seems to me.  You recognize that in some
cases (our project would be an example, we believe) the "monolithic"
approach is most appropriate.  I agree that for other projects layering
of constraint specifications is called for.  Unfortunately, even for
those cases, if W3C's schema mechanism is adopted for the core
agreement, the boundaries between the layers are driven not by the
requirements of the project (it may well be that "element E can only
contain children C when E is part of parent P" is one of the core
components universally agreed upon for a given document type), nor by
distinctions between simplicity and complexity (it would be amusing to
see an attempt to demonstrate that W3C's schema spec supports only
"simple" constraints), but by the decision to omit support for the
common requirement of context-aware content models.

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