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John Cowan wrote: > What do you mean by "derivation"? Do you mean "subsetting"? If so, > what subset do you have in mind? RELAX NG is fairly orthogonal, so if > you decide you aren't going to use some feature, just don't use it. > Obvious candidates would be the list element, datatypes, separate > files -- depending on your needs. No, I meant type derivation. Sorry, should have been more explicit about this. I'd be very interested in your view. > The current big players are committed to XSD, without doubt > (including my own > employer, alas). However, the forthcoming ISO status of RNG will help > it in certain other markets. ISO status is obviously a plus but doesn't do that much on its own to solve the "public perception" issue. > I think this is true. I'm certainly not a chief evangelist, even if > I sometimes play one on xml-dev; because of 2), there isn't likely to > be a full-time c.e. That's what I suspected. Having witnessed plenty of doomed battles in the SGML/XML standards realm (HyTime, RDF, Topic Maps... sorry, couldn't resist ruffing a few feathers :-), I'd tend to be quite skeptical myself about the prospect that RNG (John, you're strengthening my case by abbreviating the name!) could gain widespread adoption. What it needs is a killer app, and that has to be more than unioning and intersecting schemas, which to be fair is not a use case I've much heard about. I think this killer app might be related to type derivation. There are a lot of problems with XSD derivation that are coming to light as real-world cases like UBL are addressed. I'm a typical user of this stuff, and I don't really care if XSD or RELAX NG "wins". But I would like to have better standard scheme language than the current version of XSD. If I were a RELAX NG stakeholder I would try to do the following: 1) Piggyback on an effort like UBL by adding type derivation mechanisms that support real-world business cases (not always the case with XSD). 2) Build support for basic RELAX NG features and the more advanced type derivation features into Xerces. I understand Xerces doesn't support RELAX NG at all right now, is that correct? If so, this is probably more of a barrier to widespread adoption than any other factor. 3) Launch a media blitz to publicize the ISO standardization, support for UBL (say), Xerces support, etc. <flogging><horse type="dead">Ideally this effort could be leveraged to announce a new name as well.</horse></flogging> I guess I'm as attracted to Quixotic endeavors as the next guy... Matt
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