RE: basic question about xpath support of xml schema

> I think that it would be a real mistake to tie XSLT (or Xpath) too
> closely to W3C Schema. The datatypes are aligned and that's
> fair enough,
> but it is clear that there will be several possibilities for defining
> structure in XML: DTD, W3C Schema, RELAXNG, schematron, ...
> XSLT should, as far as possible, be able to work with any of these
> systems.
>
> (In particular if the input to XSLT is a tree annotated with type
> information according to teh data model it shouldn't matter how that
> type information was specified, XPath shouldn't assume it came from a
> W3C Schema.

I think we've got to specify a way of binding to type names defined in an
XML schema. If you don't want to use type names statically, then you don't
need to reference a schema, and some dyanamic type information may still be
available. I don't think we can cope with the complexity of defining
bindings to other schema languages; the best we might be able to do is to
leave the way open for implementors to provide such mechanisms.

W3C is heavily committed to schemas and these specifications are being
developed within W3C. We may not like it, but it's a fact of life.

It will certainly continue to be possible to work with documents that have
no schema, or that have only a DTD.

Mike Kay


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