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At 10:52 AM 6/11/2002 -0400, Amelia A Lewis wrote:
>Or, in a nutshell: I think that XSDL's data type definitions for simple
>types are inadequate. They need to be replaced. A replacement should,
>however, be "pluggable" (not one data type library for everyone, but the
>data type libraries that this schema/application needs), and should be
>constructed from first principles on an extensible basis in order to avoid
>the problems plaguing XSDL's data type library definition.
Maybe it's a good time to start talking about what a replacement system
should look like.
The "pluggable" approach makes a lot of sense, and seems to work well with
RELAX NG's expectations - perhaps DSDL's as well.
Personally, my hopes are fairly small:
1) An understanding of lexical forms that is more robust than the current
"thou shalt use our notation." Regular Fragmentations is one approach
toward broadening this understanding, but it's pretty basic. Using regular
expressions for more than constraints seems helpful in this regard, and I
think W3C XML Schema may well have done us a favor in developing regular
expressions with some Unicode enhancements.
2) An application approach that is independent of particular structural
validation systems, though capable of being combined with them. I'd be
happy to use RELAX NG, DTDs, or even W3C XML Schema for validation, then
have a separate phase that paints type information onto elements (or
attributes, though that's a hassle all its own.) For simple cases,
namespace-qualified names are enough, but XPath (1.0) seems capable of
addressing more difficult contextual painting.
I'm really happy with these labeled structures holding textual content that
we have right now, and I think there's lots of room to build on that
foundation.
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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