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My two cents is:
- RELAX NG has achieved depressingly little success so far in terms of
market adoption.
- However, it would be premature to throw in the towel. The RELAX NG spec
was finalized less than 4 months ago. XML is going to be around for a long
time to come and there will be a continuing need for an XML schema
language. XSD is not suddenly going to become radically simpler. Even if
RELAX NG is only adopted by a small percentage of the XML market, the XML
market is big enough that this is still worthwhile.
- RELAX NG needs more evangelizing. I think for both Murata-san and myself
it would be fair to say that our strengths are in the technical department
more than the marketing department.
- The key difficulty facing RELAX NG is that the W3C is perceived as owning
the XML core standards space; it is very hard for any specification to
compete with a W3C Recommendation in this space, especially when that
Recommendation has been adopted by the big players including Microsoft. It
will be hard for RELAX NG to compete no matter how brilliantly it is
evangelized.
- I don't think the name's a big deal; I agree calling it pronouncing it
"Relaxing" sounds a bit funny; I typically pronounce it "Relax En Gee". I
don't think the pronunciation is enshrined in any spec, so this is
something that is easy to change. But I don't think changing the name
would help: at this point it would just dilute what little name recognition
we have.
- There needs to be a tool to translate RELAX NG into DTDs and XSD. This
would allow people to have the advantage of authoring in an easy to learn
and easy to use schema language but still be able to interoperate with the
rest of the XSD-using world. At the moment, choosing to use RELAX NG means
choosing either (a) not to interoperate with DTD/XSD tools and users or (b)
to maintain two schema versions by hand; it's not surprising in these
circumstances that people don't choose RELAX NG. Maybe this is wishful
thinking, but I think if people could automatically generate decent DTDs
and XSD schemas from RELAX NG schemas, then they would be much more likely
to consider authoring in RELAX NG.
James
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