Re: [xml-dev] Blog post on limitations of import/include in W3C XML Sche

["Anthony B. Coates (XML-Dev)" <abcoatesecure-xmldev@yahoo.co.uk>]

Hi Noah.  You seem to be talking about Schema *file* repositories, I was  
certainly talking about Schema *definition* repositories, which are not  
quite the same (just as the old IBM "Visual Age for Java" product was  
different in the way it did method-level versioning instead of file-level  
versioning).

Standards are, of course, the antithesis of freedom and of "letting a  
thousand flowers bloom".  The problem that I see now, though, is a lack of  
definition-level repository functionality in the Schema tools that are  
available.  For me and the things I commonly want to do, that means that  
I'm still searching for the flowers among the blooming weeds.

The thing is, without a Schema definition repository standard, the most  
common desktop tools (e.g. XML Spy, oXygen) will only support simple  
file-based mechanisms, and so that is all that most users will think is  
possible, and we'll remain stuck where we are (not that everyone is  
unhappy with that, of course, not everyone needs a repository).

Cheers, Tony.

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:09:43 +0100, <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> I think it's also important to point out that one of the reasons that the
> core composition mechanisms of W3C XML Schema give a great deal of
> latitude as to how schemas are assembled.  Speaking for myself, I believe
> this has been done in part so that others can create schema repositories
> for various purposes.  It's my intuition that different sorts of
> repositories will be needed according to the circumstance.  For example,
> IBM's DB2 product has particular mechanisms that it uses to store schemas
> in its relational/XML store, and to decide which ones to use for
> particular validations.  So, it's not clear to me that there is one
> particular repository that the Schema WG "should" have defined in the  
> core
> recommendation. Still, I believe there are few architetural impediments  
> to
> layering on such repositories if they're needed, much as various  
> different
> code repositories can be integrated to support the build and runtime
> environments of languages like Java.

-- 
Anthony B. Coates
Senior Partner
Miley Watts LLP
Experts In Data
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