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RE: Rick Jelliffe quotable quote on the purpose of schemas

• From: "Klotz, Leigh" <Leigh.Klotz@x...>
• To: "Rick Marshall" <rjm@z...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:06:53 -0800

This is much the approach we took with XForms. 

An initial prototype instance provides the structure, though it is
application-specific and not generic to all possible classes of
documents. We augment this system with the XSD type system and
constraints; XPath location paths bind the constraints and XSD types to
the nodes. Additionally we [1] profiled XML Schema, using only
simpleTypes and no structures, and called the resulting system "XForms
Basic" [2], so an XSD can define type libraries to be associated with
nodes via XPath location paths.

With the addition of full structural validation for XML Schema (i.e.,
support for Part 1 Structures), it's full XForms 1.0.

[1] XML Schema-XForms joint task Force,
http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/sliceI.html#acks
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms-basic/ 

Leigh.
-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@z...] 
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 3:34 PM
To: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  Rick Jelliffe quotable quote on the purpose of
schemas

Hi

I want to throw my hat in the ring here from my own experience at 
constructing these things (yes i know - in the database, not document 
world...).

However, the point is that the discussion will continue until we 
recognise the fundamental difference between "structure" and
"constraint".

For my money I'd be happy if it took 2 documents to provide a valid 
description of what an xml document could contain. The first simply and 
only outlines structures. In effect it could easily be a prototype xml 
document with one of all possible structures, possibly with some sort of

ellipsis to indicate recursive inclusion - or we could stick with dtd's.

The second would be an XPath type document that lists restraints similar

to XSD.

 From my perspective (and the commercial view) this means I could have 
eg some sort of generic description of say a purchase order and then a 
constraint based instance that was my requirements - what must be 
included, optional, values limits, etc.

This was the basic approach in the ANSI EDI standards and worked very 
well to build what must remain the most successful B2B system.

This is a long way of saying that I think trying to get one tool to do 2

fundamentally different things is always going to less than optimal.

Regards
Rick


Michael Kay wrote:
>> "The flaw with grammars is that they only allow to constraint 
>> content models in a declarative manner
>>     
>
> There's nothing wrong with constraints being declarative - in fact,
they
> definitely should be - the flaw is with the expressive power of a
grammar as
> a contraint language.
>
> This is all well known. And in fact, XML Schema itself has some
> extra-grammatical constraints, namely uniqueness and referential
> constraints. But there's still a camp that believes (wrongly, in my
view)
> that the expressive power of a schema language should be restricted
for
> performance reasons.
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
>
>
>
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    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>

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  • Re: Rick Jelliffe quotable quote on the purpose of schemas
    • From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>