Re: [xml-dev] ten years later, time to repeat it?

[noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com]

David Carver writes:

> Personally, I HATE xsi:type. In most B2B scenarios I've been involved 
> with it causes more interoperability issues then it solves.

> I'd much rather get rid of XML type, and force people to validate 
> against the  schema as is

Schema types (which I'm guessing is what you mean by XML type) and 
xsi:type aren't at all the same thing.  If you get rid of Schema types, 
then you can't say "this element must contain an Integer".  Is that the 
complication you're trying to avoid?  If so, yes, you should argue against 
Schema types.

If you're arguing against xsi:type, I can certainly understand that.  It's 
the wrong thing in >90% of use cases (probably way more, but I'm just 
guessing and trying to be conservative), and it makes a mess of instance 
documents.  It was introduced because some members of the Schema WG were 
very anxious to handle serialization of object graphs, I.e. to do what 
Java Object Serialization (used by RMI) does.   SOAP Encoding is an 
example of such XML-based object serialization, and it uses xsi:type. 
Indeed, because of dynamic subtyping, it's generally the case that the 
serialization formats for such systems must carry for each item both its 
name and its type.  Go read through the format spec. for Java Object 
Serialization and you'll see that's the core of it.  In XML with schema, 
you can use the tag for the name, and xsi:type for the type. 

Personally, I'm not convinced that supporting that scenario should have 
made an 80/20 cut for schema, but as happens on a big committee, some 
people argued very strongly for it.  You can, of course, turn it off by 
using suitable "block" attributes at the right points in your schema. 
While that pretty much ensures that your instances are clean (I think 
xsi:type is still allowed for better or worse, but it can't then designate 
a type other than the one your element would have had anyway, as I 
recall), but it's a nuissance in the schema.

Noah

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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