[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RELAX NG Marketing (was RE: Do Names Matter?)
> I used to get quite irritated by the fashion for adjectival > company names > (e.g. "Rational"). But one gets used to things - fashions change. Perhaps. I certainly can't swear that the gerund form for technologies won't become a trend. Personally I doubt it, but this falls into the realm of pure speculation that XML-Devers tend to frown on. Just to make sure that I'm driving my perspective home, let me make this more general point. In a standards efforts that I am participating in (no prizes for guessing which), we had lengthy discussions about which schema language to use. Frankly, there was a lot of discontent about making XSD our official choice, for a number of reasons, especially the quite unaesthetic syntax and the lack of consistent tool support (so you never know which features are actually usable). It's quite widely felt that the spec tries to do too much. (If any XSD advocates would like to comment on these points, I'm sure this would be welcomed.) RELAX NG was much preferred by those familar with it. Its syntax is a lot clearer. It's also more powerful, allowing the calculation of schema intersections and unions. Finally, because it tries to do so much less, it should be a lot easier to support consistently across tools. However, it is widely perceived as having lost the "marketing battle" with XSD, so people are relunctant to support it. Furthermore, it isn't entirely clear what the RELAX NG folks' attitude towards derivation is. (I'd be very interested to hear an official statement on this.) This leads me to three potential conclusions: 1) All this is a storm in a teacup. XSD is fine, will be subsetted de facto and it isn't so bad anyway. RELAX NG is a nice academic idea, but it didn't gain enough support quickly enough from those who matters and is doomed to the margins forever. 2) RELAX NG is going strong, there is a significant and active push to make it a viable competitor, not just from a technology perspective but also in terms of market adoption. But I (and many others) just don't know about it. 3) There is a strong potential role for RELAX NG in the schema world, but no one is taking the role of "chief evangelist" and spreading the good word. I'm sceptical about 2), since if this was the case, by definition it would be more widely known. If 3) is the case, then ideas like simplifying the name belong firmly in the context of an overall marketing discussion. The fact that no one except Michael took the bait when I raised this point seems to imply that this isn't of widespread interest, hinting that 1) might be the case. Or maybe this point has been debated ad nauseum, and people have exhausted themselves on it. Any comments? I would emphasize once again that this is a real issue of current relevance that is facing groups who are doing schema design and need to decide what their canonical language is. Matt
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