RE: Personal reply to Edd Dumbill's XML Hack Article wrt W3C XML Schema

[Matthew Gertner <matthew.gertner@schemantix.com>]

> I like this vision that is so coherent with the processing 
> model of XML
> through pipelines of XSLT transformations.
> 
> This is adding value without breaking anything!

While it's true that the inventors of XML were prescient in providing the
option to use well-formed documents independently of schemas or DTDs
(considering the apparent difficulty in getting anything resembling a
universally accepted schema spec out the door), the kind of approach that
you are proposing runs counter to any kind of coherent long-term view of
what XML is all about. I can't see any scenario where semantics as
fundamental as data types would vary for a given XML element type across
instances.

Element types have specific semantics that don't very across instances. I
would have thought that this would be one of the few universally accepted
truths in the XML world (wishful thinking, I guess). Specifying data types
in the instance for convenience runs directly counter to this. In this case
I can't even, say, generate Java classes from schemas to process XML
instances conformant to the schema (a la Castor, Commerce One XDK,
Alphaworks Beanmaker and so forth), since the data types might vary across
instances. Say good-bye to one of the few truly forward-looking XML-based
processing models. And there's an infinite amount of additional semantic
information that I can include in a schema to bind to data sources, web
forms, SOAP-enabled applications, etc., etc. Including all of this as
attributes in each instance hardly seems practical for too many reasons to
even start contemplating.

Are people truly attracted to this idea, or is it just an exaggerated
response to the admittedly frustrating warts on the XML Schema spec?

Matthew