[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: building an object model of a XML schema
There has been a thread on this list about the language or origin of element tags. The answer for this seems to be that 'XML English' is currently more prevalent so that is what should be used. There are some people who actually believe markup might be hand written and not just the output from created tools. Firstly both those I find slightly absurd as for one thing English tags for any system my not have direct and meaning full translations. I don't want to discuss Human readable XML and constraints to English tags. What I do believe is the many questions on this list bring up much evidence to XML Schema inadequacies. What I do hope is that XML schema will be left as it is and not bastardised in a similar vain to HTML. Data return in tagged pairs of small subsets of data is a perfect application of XML schema. Maybe 'object model' is the wrong terminology but I see some form of Class and Sub Class structure being essential so that it is possible for me to do a xmlschema.sanskrit.element and I can retrieve a singular element without having to translate the British library for my single element. I guess the only reason I post on this forum is due to a wish to return to XML's origin as unary global method of sending and receiving data. XML schema unfortunately has an incorrect label as it sounds like it is the be all and end all to XML. It should be given a pen name like the plethora of alternatives out there such as Trex, Daml, RDF, OIL, Topic maps, SOAP and the ridiculous amount of XML legacy systems out there. I also deliberately say legacy systems as well because from what I see so far the XML situation already has far more interoperability problems than the binary standards that it is supposed to supersede. RDF would seem to be the answer to most questions but with answers such as <Peter> Markup is yellow stickies stuck onto elements of information to identify them, labelled accordingly. </Peter> Who knows. -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Lowery [mailto:jlowery@s...] Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2001 12:36 AM To: 'Michael Brennan'; Jeff Lowery; Xml-Dev (E-mail) Subject: RE: building an object model of a XML schema Well, I read you post and I fail to see the disagreement (this happens between me and Len all the time). So allow me to clarify: > > Right now, that information is missing from XML Schema, and > > various code > > generation implementations have their own unique ways of adding the > > information. As it should be? I hope not. > > Actually, I would not want to see that in XML Schema. If XML Missing was the wrong term; how about "rightfully absent from"? I'm not proposing adding anything to XML Schema; there's plenty there already. But people do decorate the XML Schema definitions in order to generate efficient data manipulation objects from them. The nasty is that it's language-specific. What I would like is a data modeling language, similar enough to XML Schema that would generate true XML Schema definitions, yet also include means for mapping efficiently to an abstact OO langauge. > Actually, I would not want to see that in XML Schema. If XML > Schema were > intended as a data modelling language, rather than as a > "foundation" spec > for other XML specs, I wouldn't have a problem with this. But I agree. But there is funcitonality in XML Schema that is absent from any data modeling language that I've seen, so if you took the XML-ness out of XML Schema you would have a decent start at a rich data constraint language, with mutable datatypes. I like. Oh, and you could easily generate a full-blown XML Schema from that abstract model language; and, incidentally, it has these archetypes that model ubiquitous object-model concepts which, when you map abstract data model datatypes to the archetypes, you can generate both a useful XML Schema (or DTD, or RELAX NG) and some object code whose instances represent and manipulate the data model (I guess you'd have to tie-in target data model to target object model somewhere). It would eliminate the need for my skill set, I could find a less demanding work elsewhere, you wouldn't have to read this nonsense, and we'd all be happy. Whee. > > Note, that it is also possible to annotate an XML Schema with > attributes and > elements from other namespaces. You can add application > specific info to the > model to suit your needs in a way that is compatible with other schema > processors (they can ignore your application specific info). Well, it's being done, I'm sure, but also being reinvented everywhere, for every application and every language. When this becomes an unworkable mess (becuase most of us, when left to our own devices, will do it wrong), then we will say: "Hey! There's got to be a better way." And then we can talk about this in earnest once more. The only reason this idea hasn't succeeded in the database world, IMHO, is that the object and relational models are too different to map the two automagically. Hierarchical data models simplify the problem much, methinks. > You can also do > this with RELAX NG. This is a sound approach, IMHO, to let > users extend the > model in useful ways without the core XML Schema grammar having to > accomodate everyone's use case. Yeah, but even in the data model I vaguely envision, you wouldn't pay for what you didn't use. I think that's a pattern, even. ------------------------------------------------------------------ The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe from this elist send a message with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body to: xml-dev-request@l...
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