Which is the Authority: The Schema or the Text?

[cbullard@hiwaay.net]

A mundane question:  given a specification with schemas and text  
descriptions of values, if these are in conflict which one is  
authoritative?  IOW, would you ignore the text and use the schema  
values as declared, or modify the schema to match the text>?

All too often, upstream data designers are not reading the schemas.   
Instead they rely on the text examples (eg, diagrams or instances).   
So one sees problems such as a string specification with multiple  
parts that are declared as a pattern (regex) and the parts and  
patterns don't match (e.g., lengths are not the same).  I suspect this  
is a result of having multiple spec authors and insufficient quality  
checks in implementations.   Normally one would report these and it  
gets cleaned up but when the spec is already in the field, yadda.

len