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2007 Wish List - was RE: 2007 Predictions

• From: "Michael Champion" <mc@x...>
• To: "'XML Developers List'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 10:25:27 -0800

Trying to fork the thread to distinguish what people PREDICT from what they PREFER to happen in 2007.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pete Cordell [mailto:petexmldev@t...]
> Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2007 6:26 AM
> To: XML Developers List
> Subject: Re:  2007 Predictions
> 
> Any prospect for a compact notation for XML schema in a similar vain to
> Compact Relax NG?

There is http://dret.net/projects/xscs/ and I suspect there are others.  This came to my attention because it is used by http://brainml.org/

> 
> Would this be helpful?

Probably.  As far as we can tell, most XML schemas are written by developers (See Stan's writeup of the survey conducted by the Michigan Business School) http://2006.xmlconference.org/proceedings/34/slides.pdf) and it stands to reason that they would prefer working with a more code-like syntax.

Likely?  I doubt it, partly for the reason David Megginson noted: The main thing XSD has going for it is ubiquity. Unless there is a perfect two-way mapping between some XSD-CS and XSD-XML, and there are tools on every platform to do the translation, who will *really* find it easier to work with the compact syntax  in the real world?  Or to put it differently, is the ugliness of XSD-XML really enough of a pain point to justify tool vendors to support the compact syntax?  I'd guess the complexity of the "schema object model" is more of a deterrent, so visual tools that help guide people through the abstract model will be more helpful than syntax tools. (The popularity of RNG compact syntax may not be relevant here because RNG does *not* have such a complex underlying model and the XML syntax really is a pain point ... anyone have thoughts on this?).

But I don't have any evidence of this.  Some contrary evidence might be that those schema developers in the survey primarily used Visual Studio to build their schemas, and what passes for a schema editor in VS 2005 is completely XML syntax driven. I would be very happy to advocate for support of a compact syntax if this really technically viable and is on a large number of wishlists.  

And what else is on your collective wishlist?

• References:
  • 2007 Predictions
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: 2007 Predictions
    • From: "Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@t...>