RE: [xml-dev] increment pattern for an attribute..

[Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 13:46 +0000, Michael Kay wrote:
> > XSD is so full of distinctions ...
> 
> Yes, it's not an animal that you grow more fond of as you get to know it
> better. I don't think we can ever get rid of the complexity, but I have some
> hope that we can make it do the job that users want it to do. It's nice to
> have got a release out (Saxon 9.0) that supports assertions, I'm looking
> forward to getting feedback on it.

Looking through the SAXON 9 capabilities, I see you have a markup
language SCM for serializing the XSD Schema Component Model. I have
found for several projects that it was very useful to have a single file
version of XSDs, simplified, which comes at the same thing from a
different angle.* Tony Coates put a comment on my blog that he had
needed (and made) the same kind of thing on projects he was working on.

(This has always been somewhat of a paradox in XSD: the language was
designed because it was felt that element syntax should be favoured over
DTD syntax, yet was actually modeled in terms of components not XML and
the outcomes were specified in terms of a PSVI not XML. What we gained
on the swings we lost on the roundabouts?) 

I wonder if there is some scope for coalescing these, obviously not to
surplant XSD syntax etc but to get a more XSL-friendly syntax to help
developers?  

Does SCM have a solidified schema yet? 

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

* XSLT for this at my blog
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/10/converting_xml_schemas_to_sche_1.html