Re: Can XML Schemas Support Document Systems (WAS RE: ZDNet Schemaarticle,and hiding complexity within user-friendly products)

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

I think the above is a *very* constructive mail.

> I invite people to show that the requirement for determinism
> (i.e. for LL(1) grammars) can be dropped without hurting anybody,
> because then maybe we can get consensus on dropping it in some
> future version.

Can you tell us -- Who will be hurt if we remove determinism provided by
the 1-ambiguity? I think this is one important question which probably we
should all have an idea about.

People who do document processing, I think do *not* need determinism for
any reason -- they want closure provided by non-deterministic content
models.
Also we lose *very* heavily in terms of capturing the semantics (I think
we lose even the cardinality in binary relationships which is *very*
important) if we try to maintain the 1-unambiguity.

I think this is a very good time to move towards non-deterministic content
models -- Also i think moving towards non-deterministic content models is
a *definite* forward step for several scenarios, i think one of them is
data modeling.

> But interpreting it as an innovation imposed on the document
> community by dataheads is just wrong:  if the non-determinism
> rule is bad for document processing, it's a self-inflicted wound.

<warning>speaking for himself only</warning>

thanks and regards - murali.