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RE: Schemas as Promises and Expectations

• To: "'XML DEV'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Schemas as Promises and Expectations
• From: "Don Park" <donpark@d...>
• Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 04:29:26 -0800
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <3E6AE80D.653D2B0F@f...>
• Organization: Docuverse

Both Perry and Thomas understood what I was trying to say and issues they
point are tangible.  But I don't think all of what I am thinking has been
communicated, so allow me to try again from another angle.

A schema is a formal description of an XML document.  In a sense, the schema
is a representation of the code that produced that XML document.  But there
is no similar representation of the code that consumes those XML documents.
Such representation will be useful for:

1. documenting which parts of an XML document a program depends on.

2. detecting when a program can't process a document.

3. automatically fix useful subset of possible differences.

For example, there are many versions of RSS format, but a RSS reader that
uses only the <description> element can handle RSS feeds in any RSS format.
But there is easy way to determine this without some smart code analyzer.
Having a schema representation of the parts the RSS reader is interested in
will be pretty useful.  Unfortunately, I don't think current schema
languages support this use-case well.

Best,

Don Park
Docuverse

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: Schemas as Promises and Expectations
    • From: Don Bate <donbate@i...>
  • Re: Schemas as Promises and Expectations
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

• References:
  • Re: Schemas as Promises and Expectations
    • From: "W. E. Perry" <wperry@f...>

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