Re: [xml-dev] XML spec and XSD

[Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Sun, Nov 08, 2009 at 09:52:36AM +0530, Mukul Gandhi wrote:
[...]
> My averment was to give XSD the same status as DTD, as a XML
> validation technology in W3C XML spec.

Speaking as W3C XML Activity Lead :-) I don't see a reason to
give XSD special status in that way.

W3C XSD has a lot of uses, and works well if you are also
using XSLT 2, XQuery, Web Services or other specifications
where the XSD support is well-integrated.  This doesn't in
any way preclude using RelaxNG, DTDs, Schematron, or any
other sort of validation, and it's not really the place of
the XML specification to give a list of other technologies
that are used with it or build on it.

As Tim and others said, DTDs are in the XML specification for
historical reasons.  If we had the resources, I can certainly
imagine refactoring XML 1.0 to put DTDs into a separate document,
and to bring into that document namespaces and xml:base and
maybe others. But the work of doing that is much greater than
it sounds -- making sure the text retains the same meaning,
and even that documents referring to specific productoins in the
EBNF grammar are not broken as a result.

So I don't expect much enthusiasm for making a new edition of
XML to make the Informative References include XSD, but
please don't take that as a negative statement about XSD :-)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/