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Re: Making a silk purse out of the schema sows ear - was [xml

• To: "XML Developers List" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Making a silk purse out of the schema sows ear - was Minimal XML Specification
• From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@C...>
• Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2006 13:24:16 -0500
• In-reply-to: <BAY114-W37B84234AFFD78C8AE7A599000@p...>
• References: <BAY114-W37B84234AFFD78C8AE7A599000@p...>

At 2006-02-08 09:05 -0800, Michael Champion wrote:
>- RELAX NG is clearly "better" for textual documents but doesn't 
>have much support for the data-oriented use cases. (Sure you can 
>plug in the XSD type system, but that's a big part of the problem).

RELAX-NG is ISO/IEC 19757-2 (note that the compact syntax is also now 
standardized as an amendment to the original ISO document), and its 
data type system is "plug and play".  Yes, W3C Schema Part 2 can be 
used, but ISO/IEC 19757-5 Data Types is the standardization of the 
Datatype Library Language (DTLL) 
http://www.jenitennison.com/datatypes/DTLL.html proposed by Jeni Tennison.

>We now have an unpleasant situation of fragmentation where there's 
>little mainstream tool support for RELAX NG due to lack of demand

But that's the rub ... where would the demand be without the 
successful uses of it to draw out the demand?  "Demand" for W3C 
Schema support came from on high as edict, to which W3C-related 
vendors responded; the grassroots demand for RELAX NG is merit-based 
and users are in a position to make demands of vendors for support.

>- Schematron is moving forward as an ISO standard and has some good 
>implementations but has few normative references in vertical 
>industry standards nor mindshare.  (Correct me if I'm wrong about 
>the normative references).

I've incorporated ISO/IEC 19757-3 Schematron normatively in an aspect 
of the Universal Business Language (UBL) project; a draft of the use 
of Schematron in a code list value validation methodology is at:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ubl/200512/msg00101.html

UBL users in Denmark are also employing a lot of Schematron (perhaps 
Bryan can talk to this).

I think we will see much more demand for ISO/IEC 19757-4 
Namespace-based Validation Dispatching Language (NVDL) as grassroots 
interest in the power of despatching separate validation tasks will 
promote more heterogeneous use of XMl vocabularies in instances.

I'm also excited about what will come from ISO/IEC 19757-7 Character 
Repertoire Description Language (CRDL) to express the constraints on 
the Unicode characters used in an XML document so as to ensure 
processing systems can work on the characters found in documents.

All these (and others) are parts of ISO/IEC 19757 Document Schema 
Definition Languages (DSDL) ... note the plural to emphasis different 
horses for different courses ... see http://dsdl.org for more 
details, or get involved with your country's National Body to ISO and 
work on its development yourself!

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

--

G. Ken Holman                    Crane Softwrights Ltd.
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 Secretariat  Standards Council of Canada
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Corporate website:               http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/a/



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  • Making a silk purse out of the schema sows ear - was Minimal XML Specification
    • From: "Michael Champion" <michael.champion@h...>

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