Re: Regarding the vote on XML Schema.

[Murali Mani <mani@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

I have tried to emphasize the main points in Rick's mail.

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Rick Jelliffe wrote:

> The brilliance of James Clark's programming and the habitual goodness of his
> heart, the admirable determination and pioneering spirit of Murata-san (who
> has selflessly had to work on so many projects such as MIME and the Japanese
> profile of XML that divert him from his life's work), the institutionalized
> humility of the XML Schemas WG who took an extra year to evaluate and
> respond to community comments on XML Schemas despite _considerable_ economic
> pressure to finish earlier, all these are inspirational, and I am the last
> person to want to diminish them.

I also admire every approach and work done a lot. It requires remarkable
courage, determination and good will to try to achieve what the above 3
have accomplished. I have heard a *lot* about the difficulties the schema
WG has had to go through, and I am sincerely apologetic for any additional
worries that are being caused by the discussions, especially by myself. I
think the intention of everyone is to clarify things. I think everyone
sincerely appreciates all the work that has gone on in the field, they all
have added to our common knowledge and experience.

> The reason for plurality is not merely because there are lots of
> different methods and we should be able to fit the best schema
> technology to the problem at hand, but because humans have different
> capabilities.

Yes, there are different solutions. And we cannot expect everyone to think
alike.

As a person who has studied some small portion of XML research, i think it
is my responsibility to give the conclusions on this part. Also I think it
is my responsibility that I put the effort to spread this awareness among
the users. It is *definitely* up to the more experienced people to make
the decisions. From my side, I know I do *not* qualify to make the
decisions on behalf of the entire XML community.

I think most members of this list share the same opinions. All I am saying
is my conclusions, which are -- document processing such as XSLT and
XQuery are severely affected by XML schema. document processing almost
always produces non-deterministic content models, also I am not sure if we
need unique particle attribution, but in case we need it, we mostly might
end up needing UPA provided by unambiguous grammars, the UPA provided by
XML Schema is very exaggerated and I believe unnecessary.

> Murata-san was a member of the Schema WG, he presented his ideas as they
> were formulated then, and they failed to win the day, for whatever reasons.
> The idea, in TREX and others before it, that you should tie element and
> attribute occurrences was also discussed (to what extent I don't know, it
> happened before my time) under the guise of "co-occurrence constraints, and
> again it failed to gain enough votes.  It is fair game to debate the merits
> of these decisions, and to look at whose interests these decisions support,
> or what kinds of documents are well supported by such decisions, but it is
> not fair to say that the issues were ignored completely.

Yes, I am sure all the factors were considered by the schema WG to their
best capabilities with the support they were provided with.

anyway, I think I should get back to work. there are also two threads I
have not answered for more than a week -- one is regarding RDF, and one is
regarding representing relationships in logical data models -- so let me
go ahead and try to reply them.

cheers and regards - murali.