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Tuesday, January 1, 2008

XML Schemas: Guaranteed Non-Interoperability as a Design Methodology?

The vogue quip that 'a camel is a horse designed by committee' probably
makes more sense to people who don't live in a desert country. From
here in Australia, camels seem to a very plausible design. It is the
speaker, actually, who is wrong: what you need is a camel when you are
in the desrt, a horse on the planes, a yak in the mountains, perhaps a
porpoise in the sea, and an elephant in the jungle. The ongoing XML
Schemas trainwreck shows little sign of improvement; that users have
so repetitively stated their problem and received no satisfaction from
the W3C shows how disenfranchised they are. I am thinking about these
things again this week for three reasons... One positive thing that has
come out has been the W3C Basic XML Schemas Databinding Patterns which
lists various XPaths that databinding tools can have. It mentions how
to use these in Schematron, which is good too... But it doesn't come up
to the level of a profile. And, to be fair, the W3C Schema WG has also
upgraded XSD to reduce some gotchas that have been reported, such as
allowing unbounded on all groups.

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