[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Notations for datatypes
Hi Jonathan, > Rick Jelliffe reminded me in private email that he had proposed notations > to the W3C XML Schema WG as a way of declaring data types. Let me ask a few > questions about a notation-based design for declaring datatypes: > > 1. How do you declare the types of attributes? I asked that question too. You can't do it with notations in XML. Arjun Ray supplied the SGML answer: --- > Not in XML. But it's possible in SGML, using the DATA declared value. > > <!ATTLIST foo > bar DATA baz #IMPLIED > > > > where the DATA keyword is followed by the name of a declared notation. --- > 2. How do you define common libraries of data types using notations > that are shared across schemas? > > 3. How would using a syntax based on notations simplify the design > of the schema language as a whole - what difference would it make? I think, from the adversarial way in which you put your questions, that you've jumped to some unwarranted conclusions about my motivations for exploring how DTDs could declare W3C XML Schema data types. Just to explain: I've recently been using RELAX NG with W3C XML Schema data types and then using Trang to automatically convert that schema into a DTD. When you do that conversion, you lose the information about the types of elements (and attributes). I was wondering whether NOTATIONs could be a way of preserving that information in the DTD, which would help round-trip conversions. What I was thinking is that we could have a regular scheme for NOTATION public identifiers, using the namespace URI of the data type with a fragment identifier indicating the name of the data type. (This would only work for namespaces that didn't use fragment identifiers themselves, I guess, but they're thankfully rare.) Sounds like this would be a feasible scheme for preserving element types. But your questions have got me thinking. The main distinction, I think, between a notation-based mechanism and the mechanism in W3C XML Schema is that in the former data types can be indicated through an identifier rather than through a reference to their definition. That's powerful (for simple data types) because it decouples the method used to define the data type from the method used to define the element or attribute that uses the data type. It means that a data type could be defined in many ways -- with a simple type definition in a W3C XML Schema schema; with a Java class that implements a particular type-definition API that we can invent; through a natural language definition in a spec such as those for the W3C XML Schema primitive types and so on. In terms of simplifying the schema language, it would mean that the schema language could take the same step as RELAX NG has made, and concentrate on how to define element/attribute structures, enabling it to reuse the work that's gone into defining data types elsewhere. Actually, though, I think I'm being unfair to W3C XML Schema, because it is half way there. You can already use data types from libraries that haven't been defined using W3C XML Schema if you import the namespace for those libraries but don't specify a schemaLocation. It would be even better if you could specify a schemaLocation but it didn't have to be a W3C XML Schema schema, but I think that if W3C XML Schema made that change, it would really have to have a special kind of import for data type libraries, in the same way that RELAX NG does. *Complex* data types are another matter entirely, as usual. Cheers, Jeni --- Jeni Tennison http://www.jenitennison.com/
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