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joe@ispsoft.de (Jochen Wiedmann) writes:
>I am not so keen on the idea of supporting Relax NG, Schematron, and
>all that stuff. But a simplification of XML Schema would make quite
>some sense, much in the way of DocBook with its spinoff DocBook Lite.
The prospect of supporting multiple schema languages seems to be what
drives vendors to circle the wagons around W3C XML Schema, even when
there's lots of griping from those wagons about the various failures of
WXS. Many of these vendors have gone so far as to bake this poison into
the core of their projects, and pulling it out - even for a "Schema
Lite" - would be fairly difficult.
I recommend that developers skip the WXS headaches at this point and
define XML vocabularies in RELAX NG. That doesn't mean cutting yourself
off from the WXS world - it just means working in the comfort of a
language that works and transforming that into a language that some
programs insist on speaking when you're done.
This kind of transformation can, of course, create problems, as RELAX NG
and WXS have slightly different feature sets, and developers who either
want to be up close to WXS or developers who have to be up close to WXS
may not find it perfect. For those people, the WXS salt mines seem
inevitable. Data types can also be an issue, and I suspect RELAX NG or
someone else needs to come up with something more rational than the
gHorribleKludge mess (and associated philosophies) that currently
dominates.
The other area that's troubling in this equation is a long-standing
problem: developers who create schemas of whatever flavor and expect
users (and other developers) to be able to read them. I'll take
human-readable documentation over any flavor of schema, and thank the
WXS designers for including useful hooks for schema documentation - it's
gotten me out of a few scrapes where the WXS wasn't clear enough on its
own.
James Clark (Trang) and Kohuske Kawaguchi (XSV) deserve enormous credit
for making such things possible.
(I also encourage people to use Schematron, but its usage patterns are
different enough from WXS and RELAX NG that it works more as a
extraordinarily powerful supplement than as a replacement.)
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
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