[Announce] RELAX NG, A Simpler Schema Language for XML

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>]

Hi,

I am happy to announce that the first edition of my RELAX NG book should
now be available in the bookstores.

You'll find plenty of information on line, but be cautious about what
you'll read on Amazon.com (the other Amazon local sites are more
accurate): the book has been published December 2003 (instead of July)
and it has 506 pages (instead of 304).

Why 506 pages when my W3C XML Schema book has only 400 pages and RELAX
NG supposed to be much simpler than W3C XML Schema?

There are many reasons for this.

First it has been much more fun to write about RELAX NG than to write
about W3C XML Schema and when you like a subject you tend to be more
verbose.

In particular, I have been able to go much deeper in the "core" of RELAX
NG and have gone as far as writing a (partial, shame on me)
implementation of RELAX NG to make sure I was understanding the
specification as well as possible. That means that I have been able to
cover a much deeper scope in the RELAX NG book. 

I have also added chapters developing some options to generate schemas
and to annotate them to be able to transform them. These are topics that
could apply to other schema languages but they were not mature enough
(at least in my brain) to be included in my WXS book.

Then RELAX NG is frequently used with W3C XML Schema part 2: datatypes.
Since we have not wanted to require that you buy both books (of course,
we'll be happy if you do it) we have included the chapters from my W3C
XML Schema book about datatypes (updated and adapted to the context and
syntax of RELAX NG). That includes the descriptions of the datatypes,
their facets, the WXS regular expression and the reference guide.

There is also a purely typographical factor: for each example I have
taken care to give both the XML and the compact syntax of the schemas
and that has added a lot of content.

The last reason is that, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago
(http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200312/msg00360.html)
it's not always that much easier to explain something which is simple
and coherent than something which is complex and heterogeneous.

To explain something which is simple and coherent (think for instance of
a perfect sphere), you need to find a starting point and the design
doesn't help you that much to find a logical progression. To explain
something which is complex and heterogeneous (think for instance of a
snowman) you just need to describe each of the parts and their
interactions.

Anyway, you'll get 506 pages for the price of 304 and I hope you'll find
them useful and enjoy them!

Eric

PS: The online version (http://books.xmlschemata.org/relaxng/) will be
updated when the DocBook sources will have been synchronised with the
paper version. 
-- 
Don't you think all these XML schema languages should work together?
                                                         http://dsdl.org
Upcoming XML schema languages tutorial:
 - Santa Clara  -half day- (15/03/2004)        http://masl.to/?J24916E96
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(ISO) RELAX NG   ISBN:0-596-00421-4 http://oreilly.com/catalog/relax
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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