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At 12:42 PM 21/01/02 -0800, Paul Prescod wrote:
>3. To supply machine readable information about a namespace. i.e. to
>find a schema for a namespace, or an XSLT stylesheet for a namespace, or
...
>Now RDDL comes along and tries to make it easy to find "the"
>schema for a namespace. Or "the" XSLT for a namespace. But there is no
>"right" schema for a namespace. The right one depends on the document
>type (i.e. what the document means, all together) and what the recipient
>is trying to do with the document.
>
>So of RDDL's three goals, #3 doesn't seem practically achievable until
>and unless we define a data model for namespaces and define the
>semantics of namespace combination. If we do not do that, then HTML is
>probably a sufficient referent.
You're right about schemas but wrong about RDDL. RDDL makes it easy
to list half a dozen different schemas (in multiple schema languages
or even in just one) for a namespace - the "purpose" and the human-
readable documentation would ideally explain the differences between
them and what they're intended to be used for. A RDDL could have
pointers to two wildly-different XML Schemas with identical
natures and purposes, both claiming to be the only authoritative way
to validate elements from some namespace - in which case it would
hopefully supply some additional human-readable documentation to
help sort things out.
The fallacy that there can be a single right schema or stylesheet
or whatever is probably the central motivation that drove me
into the work of helping with RDDL.
I don't think you've established that goal #3 is not achievable
in the general case. In the face of lousy hodge-podge designs
that pay little attention to composability, obviously pointers
to the relevant bits of schema-ware and so on aren't going to
help. But we can hope for better than that. -Tim
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