Venetian Blinds vs Garden of Eden patterns for industry standards XML Sc

[Lech Rzedzicki <xchaotic@gmail.com>]

Hi all.

I am now involved in developing the next iteration of schemas to
standardise information storage and exchange for trademarks and design
(there is also some cooperation with patent people).
The current standards (TM-XML and DS-XML) use a venetian blind pattern
because it nicely mimics OO model, so it's easy to generate classes
and objects, also it hides element definitions so there's no conflicts
when processing them. Finally the naming convention (not my idea)
means that the element names are not reusable anyway.
Some people are now proposing that we move to "Garden of Eden" design
patter, but I don't see that as a particularly smart move in the
context of our domain.
I have noticed that many of the schemas in the industry, for instance
UBL have gone for Garden of Eden first and and later reverted to
Venetian Blinds.
I am very interested in some thoughts from the trenches as to why one
or the other approach might be more useful in a committee driven
standards with contributors from different domains.

No need to point me to google either - I have read all the articles
about it [1,2,3] and authored schemas that are in production now both
ways, but still unconvinced either way...


References:

[1] A slideshows on various approaches:
http://dret.net/lectures/xml-fall08/xsd-2#(11)
[2] http://www.xfront.com/GlobalVersusLocal.html - schema best practices
[3] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-schemascope/
etc...