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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XML Schema in Z ?
 In response to Jonathan Robie's question: what should the Schema WG do next? A suggestion: in parallel with anything else you do, re-express the Schema spec in a mathematical specification language such as VDM or Z. Publish a mathematically annotated version of the spec. What would Z or VDM do for Schema? They use elementary maths (mainly set theory) to express more precisely what you mean. This is the best way I know to expose any inconsistencies, ambiguities and gaps in a spec. Better even than implementing. A spec in Z is never 'just maths'; it is maths with explanatory English. Reading it, trying to relate the maths and the English, clears the cobwebs faster than anything. People have noted pieces of 'tortured prose' in the schema spec. Try turning the tortured prose into maths. If the maths is simple, we have learned something, and can probably re-express the ideas in simpler English. If the maths is tortured, we have got a problem! Then leave that part for release 2 and sort it out first. Writing a Z spec is a piece of intense work, and reading it is not for everybody. But getting the spec right is _much_ cheaper than implementing and finding problems downstream. Michael Kay has commented that namespaces doubled the complexity of implementing SAXON; we need to be sure there are no such complexity time-bombs in XML schema. A lot of people will implement on top of it for a long time. W3C needs to be sure it is releasing a quality specification, as Schema will be so central. This would be a cost-effective way to do so. Robert Worden 
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