RE: [xml-dev] RNG more popular with doc heads and XSD with data heads?

["Chris Wilper" <cwilper@cs.cornell.edu>]

> (I'm speaking on RELAX NG to Cornell librarians on January 16 - 
> if anyone's going to be in the Ithaca area, let me know.)

Well, let me see.... I'll be here. :)  Time/location specifics?

> I'm not sure I buy it, except maybe to the extent that data 
> heads stay far enough away from the markup that they choose 
> tech based on what tools are most immediately available, and 
> WXS had a head start there. For people who need to create 
> generic environments but still insist on determinism, WXS 
> probably has an edge.

As far as WXS' entrenchment in web service-related work,
I now try to avoid it when I can.  In the software I work on
(a repository for "digital objects"), we initially defined
one of the APIs using WSDL, bound with SOAP via HTTP, with
WXS for data typing.  A desire for strong typing and a
percieved future pervasiveness of WXS were the strong
factors.  

I now consider WXS to be a huge amount of overhead for our 
needs, and as much as the tools say they support it, it's
hard to find any WXS-savvy software that doesn't include
the phrase "supports a subset of ...". The result is that
for myriad of insane types you can *define* in WXS, you really
have to keep it as basic as possible to ensure that people
can use them with their tools, much less make sense of them.

Without saying anything specific about RELAX NG, I can say
that people doing WS-Stuff are interested in a simpler, more
practical alternative to WXS for typing.

- Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 10:48 AM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] RNG more popular with doc heads and XSD with data
heads? 


bob.ducharme@lexisnexis.com (DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO)) writes:
>I saw someone (don't remember who) make the generalization recently
>that RELAX NG is gaining in popularity with people doing XML work with
>irregularly structured documents that would end up being published in
>some medium or other (the "doc heads"), and that W3C Schemas are more
>entrenched with the XML developers doing systems involved in more
>transactional processes such as web services and database interaction
>("data heads"). Does anyone strongly agree or disagree with this? 

I'm not sure I buy it, except maybe to the extent that data heads stay
far enough away from the markup that they choose tech based on what
tools are most immediately available, and WXS had a head start there.
For people who need to create generic environments but still insist on
determinism, WXS probably has an edge.

Otherwise, I don't think the generalization holds.  I'm working with a
group of librarians on metadata representation, all of which feels like
relational database information expressed as XML, and RELAX NG was
extremely helpful to getting the project started.  (I'm speaking on
RELAX NG to Cornell librarians on January 16 - if anyone's going to be
in the Ithaca area, let me know.)

I'm also fascinated by the apparent fact that RELAX NG is far more
capable of describing RDF's syntactic possibilities than is W3C XML
Schema.  I tend to regard RDF as an uber-data project, even though its
users frequently have at least familiarity with documents.  I suspect
there's room for a lot more experiments with RDF and XML, and hope such
experiments might in the end obviate most of the need for RDF/XML per
se.

Even where WXS is used, I marvel at how it just doesn't quite fit.  The
interactions between Microsoft Excel 2003's native types and W3C XML
Schema importation are complex and fascinating.  Microsoft Access 2003
provides extra type information on the declarations of schemas it
exports rather than rely on WXS types.

I don't think any dust has settled in the schema space yet.  



-----------------------------------------------------------------
The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an
initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org>

The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/

To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>