RE: [xml-dev] So, what's new in the world of RELAX NG?

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

My experiences as PM for XML Schema technologies at MSFT suggest that RELAX NG doesn't really solve the problem most developers have with XSD. Many of them use XSD as a datatyping language [at least most developers on Microsoft platforms did] in which case RELAX NG is actually worse than XSD for them since it is more expressive than XSD when in truth they need something less so. See http://whidbey.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_fxgenref/html/07ff107a-2a2e-4bf4-819f-6a591ee54479.asp for an example of one of the reasons I doubt you'll see RELAX overtaking XSD in developer toolkits anytime soon. 
 
Another problem is that lots of vertical and niche industry standard schemas have chosen XSD as the language of choice given that it is the W3C's offering in this space. 
 
Finally, although RELAX NG is a better validation language than XSD the truth is lots of XML applications don't need or use validation. For example, I'm unaware of any XML Web Services stack that actually does schema validation on sending or receiving messages. 
 
-- 
PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM
The only person who gets all his work done by Friday is Robinson Crusoe.   

________________________________

From: Bill de hÓra [mailto:bill.dehora@propylon.com]
Sent: Sat 1/8/2005 6:05 PM
To: XML Developers List
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] So, what's new in the world of RELAX NG?



Michael Champion wrote:

> So, is this because RELAX NG is mature and people are productively
> using it and don't need to talk about it, or has it hit a plateau (or
> worse) in the adoption curve?   Does anyone want to argue that it is
> quietly gaining traction and mindshare in the real world of end-users?

In my corner of the world, it's gaining mindshare. What I see are people
using rng as the canonical schema format and exporting it to xsd for
tool usage. In other words xsd is an implementation detail; people are
thinking in rng.

In terms of optics, rng seems to be a victim of its own success. It
doesn't conserve complexity and doesn't require much by the way of
tools. Vendors are not motivated to build tools for rng. End users and
developers who have come to expect to do integration work through tools
don't use rng as a result of there not being tools.

cheers
Bill

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