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Re: Restrictions on existence of attributes?

• To: Michael Champion <mchampion@x...>
• Subject: Re: Restrictions on existence of attributes?
• From: Jirka Kosek <jirka@k...>
• Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:18:31 +0200
• Cc: Stan Kitsis <skits@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <44A34133.8040507@x...>
• References: <7C80003DF5F4D640840D0D37250C143E01A1035F@R...> <44A303FA.10409@k...> <44A34133.8040507@x...>
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Michael Champion wrote:

> RELAX NG is probably a "better" language for document-like XML 
> structures, but it is insufficient for data-intensive applications. 

What are these insufficiencies?

> Trouble is, a lot of people have flexible documents full of data that 
> came from objects or databases.  They'll have a hard time with the 
> "flexible document" limitations of XSD, but a hard time with the "object 
> serialization" limitations of RELAX NG.

What limitations? Of course, you can create ambiguous content models in 
RELAX NG that are hard to map to fixed object structures. But this is 
not limitation of RELAX NG, it is rather limitation of object-oriented 
type systems. And anyway, if your primary data source is object or 
relational store and you are using XML as a serialization format you do 
not have to use such advanced RELAX NG features.

> Again, the bottom line here is that it would be good to have a lot more 
> hard evidence that RELAX NG is really a more pragmatic solution than XSD 
> to problems such as this one before recommending it, irrespective of its 
> many excellent technical properties.

Everyone who works with RELAX NG (at least in my experience) will tell 
you that he/she didn't have any problems with it. The only problem is 
that big vendors for some reason doesn't want to add support for another 
schema language into their toolkits. This means that RELAX NG is now 
used mainly only by informed experts, but not by masses of developers.

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    • From: Jirka Kosek <jirka@k...>
  • Re: Restrictions on existence of attributes?
    • From: Michael Champion <mchampion@x...>

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