Re: [xml-dev] Schema Namespace name, schemaLocation,and Schema V ersioning

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@comcast.net>]

I am scratching my head right now about how to deal with versioning when one
schema imports a number of others.  Right now I am working with - and making
recommendations about - a top-level (xml-) schema that imports four or five
others.  It is actually intended to become standard someday, and it imports
schemas that will themselves be standards controlled by other groups.  Each
schema - we think- will have its own namespace.

Were any of these schemas to change, continued operations with old-version
documents will be highly desirable or even essential, since there may be
many users and information providers and it is beyond reason that they would
all change over at the same time, or even at all.  At the same time, it
would be useful to be able to run a validation check and discover if any of
the imports (or the top-level schema) has changed.

So it seems that the instance documents need to indicate somehow the
possible versions of all the schemas, not just the top-level one.  The
namespaces should not be changed, I think, in the interest of continued
operation, so that leaves version attributes.  It seems a bit strange, but
maybe this is what is needed:

<root-element version-schema1='1.0' version-schema2='1.1>

and so on.  Or even better, use namespaced version attributes that are fixed
in each schema:

<top:root-element
    xmlns:top='uri:schema1:7-22-2002'
    xmlns:first-import='uri:schema2:8-15-2002'
    xmlns:second-import='uri:schema3:5-1-2002'
    top:version='1.0'
    first-import:version='1.1'
    second-import:version='0.9'>

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Cheers,

Tom P