Re: Shexc tied to XML?

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 8:30 AM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:

>
> Is it?    To me it looks like someone combined data structure definitions
> from any language that has such things (Pascal, C, Java, Go, ....) with the
> Kleene operators, known to every programmer from EBNF and RegExps.
>
> Eric may have been thinking about relaxng, but the design makes prefect
> sense and seems completely familiar to some of us not steeped in relaxng
>

Isn't this still a vendor organization? Whatever you want to say about the
origin and quality of ShEx syntax (I don't like it at all, personally), the
fact remains:

* it has no users
* it has no production implementations
* it has no *company* standing behind it to support it in the market
* it has no experts writing books about it

I have told Holger many times privately that I don't really like SPIN too
much, but it has *all* of the above things and more. Same goes for IBM
Resource Shapes.

ShEx is a research project and nothing more. I thought we weren't doing R&D
in W3C WGs any more?

There are *three* at least *adequate* commercial solutions to start from.
There's simply no need for ShEx.

Cheers,
Kendall

PS--No offense meant to EricP: he's a fine researcher in this space and I'm
sure there are several good papers to be written about ShEx. But this is
standardization of a space that has, in some sense, *too many* starting
points, not too few. SPIN, Resource Shapes, and even ICV are all *real*
systems in comparison.