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RE: Relax NG and Web Services (formerly Joining the church)

• To: 'David Megginson' <david@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Relax NG and Web Services (formerly Joining the church)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 15:20:59 -0500

You might be interpreting that more favorably than it was 
for any given instance, and avoiding the unpleasantries of 
the secondary interpretations that made it into the press, 
but for the results, you about right.  

On the other hand, as a means of decoration and validation, 
and as a means to contractually commit to the form, DTDs 
keep on keeping on.  Why?  Probably because whether the 
XML specification team realized it or not, it is in the 
sweetspot of capabilities if not the desirable syntax.
RELAX made it even sweeter and that may be what Tim 
is alluding to here.  Given he says he has been using 
DTDs, that makes sense.  He only needs a little more 
capability as RSS/nEcho is not a complicated language 
and for that, Relax is perfect.  He just 
goes a step too far and suggests that no one else 
should need XSD and that is somewhat the same as saying 
no one should need more than he does.  XSD designers 
may disagree.

I will still be suggesting to the X3D Team that they 
consider a RELAX version of their schema because the 
DTD is torture and it is an interesting test to see 
if RELAX ends up being better than the XSD currently 
provided.  If so, that is good anecdotal evidence. 

Types are a concern for X3D.  I am interested in 
discovering if that is a characteristic for XML 
apps designed as encodings of object models first, 
and only secondarily as documents for bits on the wire.

len


From: David Megginson [mailto:david@m...]

Bullard, Claude L (Len) writes:

 > What is interesting to me is that this many years after the
 > specification of XML, all of the noise about relying on
 > well-formedness and self-description, and the general public
 > distain for DTDs, how many people are still using DTDs and who they
 > are.

You might be distorting that past discussion a bit.  A lot of people
argued in favour of the benefits of DTD-less processing, but I don't
think that many disputed the benefit of a DTD or other schema on the
authoring side.

For me, a DTD or other schema on the processing side is little more
than a stylesheet for transforming XML documents into a boolean value
(valid/not-valid).  That can sometimes be very useful for specific
types of applications, but the whole thing could use some serious
demystification -- on the production side, schemas are really no more
important than any other kind of stylesheet.

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