[ASL] the Active Schema Language : a new schema technology

[Philippe Poulard <Philippe.Poulard@sophia.inria.fr>]

People familiar with DTD, Relax NG, W3C XML Schema, Schematron, and that 
are aware of more recent works such as DSDL should recognize all of them 
in the Active Schema Language.

Anyway, ASL differs slightly because it allows to switch from a content 
model to another with any arbitrary complex condition that can't be 
expressed usually in grammar based model for example ; another 
difference is that ASL allows to compute content model boundaries 
dynamically, whereas other schema technologies only provide hard-coded 
values, at best (that's why ASL is an "active" schema technology).
ASL also provides a smart support for data types ; of course, it is 
intending to be compliant with existing data type libraries such as W3C 
XML Schema data types, but it also provide means to define new data 
types very efficiently ; custom types are "semantic friendly", that is 
to say that users can define a type where "0°C" is greater than "31°F"
As part of the Active Tags technologies, ASL can embed other modules, 
for example to check with SQL if an attribute value is inside an RDBMS 
table.
ASL provides many other features.
Designing an ASL instance (including defining data types) can be done 
with only 20 tags.

I pretend that ASL allows to express much more assertions than other 
schema technologies, but you are not obliged to believe me ; so, see by 
yourself ! Read more here :
http://disc.inria.fr/perso/philippe.poulard/xml/active-tags/active-schema/active-schema.html
Enjoy your new toy.

An implementation will be provided soon.

Feedbacks (pros & cons) are welcome.
Active contribution too.
-- 
Cordialement,

            ///
           (. .)
  -----ooO--(_)--Ooo-----
|   Philippe Poulard    |
  -----------------------