RE: ZDNet Schema article,and hiding complexity within user-friendlyproducts

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

To be fair, in my working world, until MSXML 4.0, 
XML Schema could only be a research topic.  Now it 
can become a tool.  This isn't to put down other 
efforts, just that some of us don't pick 
our tools.  Until MS says it is cooked, the W3C 
can play maitre d' but not much more.  No this 
doesn't bother me at all.  Tools is tools.

The interesting application is not validation but 
generation of support systems from the schema.  As 
has been pointed out often in the past, many 
schema uses are upstream in the authoring suite.  
Charlie Sorgi (then Mentor Context) pointed this 
out in the late eighties about SGML:  a DTD is as much a 
specification for the authoring tool as anything 
else.   Not that validation is not useful.  Like 
so many things, it should be useful on demand, a 
service, not necessarily a constraint.

The datatypes spec is widely useful of course.

I looked at Eisenberg's article on TREX this morning 
at xml.com.  I came away with the impression that 
the main advantage was it is simpler.  On the other 
hand, the things that bug me in XSD are as Jeliffe pointed 
out and covered with Schematron is the lack of ability 
to cite co-occurrence constaints. 

So I tend to agree that understanding which features 
of a schema language are immediately and directly 
applicable should be the first order for business.  

Otherwise, even if simpler, it's just more stuff.  
We have enough stuff.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@ebt.com]

I think a more telling point is that people don't use validation
that much anyway... be it using DTD's, XSchema, or whatever. 
What percentage of people on this list *really* use validation
as part of normal processing?