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From: Murali Mani <mani@C...> >There should be good reasons why two very >prolific mathematicians and XML practitioners such as James Clark and >Makoto Murata have decided not to adopt fully the solution proposed by XML >Schema Yes. But why should anyone expect there to be unanimity? Surely the big thing that we can learn from XML Schemas is that the expectation that we can have a single language--no matter how big or small, elegant or rich, feathered or porpoise-like--that is suitable for everyone is a fantasy. Which is why questions of whether we prefer ambiguous to unambigous grammars, or the Islamic calendar to the Gregorian calendar, should be dealt with _after_ we have built a suitable framework for modular but controllable schemas. With a modular framework, the stakes are lower, we are not forced to make decisions on issues which have no single obvious winnner. Without modularity we are forced into an unpleasant world of winners and losers, depending on whether our application's needs are consonant with the ones weighed highly by the particular schema language developers. Merely saying "XML Schemas bad! RELAX good!" keeps the cart before the horse. If there is no modularity or ability to plug-n-play with different kinds of schema, then every little engineering trade-off has to be subjected to exhaustive discussion (as in XML Schemas) with no guarantee that the result will satisfy everyone. It is good to have a nice powerful, branded language that can support test suites and be reasoned about enough to allow efficient storage and querying. But does that require a monolith? Cheers Rick Jelliffe P.S. Just before RELAX and TREX, there was the excellent DSD [2] too. It has many useful ideas. [1] http://www.liss.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Dec-1999/0687.html [2] http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=135
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