RE: Using W3C Regular Expressions

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 12:31 PM 4/18/01 -0700, Michael Brennan wrote:
>For this sort of simple example, this seems reasonable to me. However, I
>hope there is not going to be too much of a trend toward doing this sort of
>thing. In my mind, if a datatype has some structure to it, why not just make
>it a complex type and leverage XML syntax to convey that structure? Isn't
>that really the whole point of XML -- a standardized syntax for conveying
>structure?

I'm afraid the trend's already happened:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css-style-attr
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#duration
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#time
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#date
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#gYearMonth
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#gYear
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#gMonthDay
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#QName

Given that situation, I'd like very much to have a means of breaking into 
different lexical forms representing such compounds without having to 
revert to full-scale XML Schema processing.

It's not so much that I want to encourage such things, but that they 
already exist and that I'm not especially impressed with current models for 
processing and handling them.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books