Re: What comes first, the schema or the document

Hi,

Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> writes:

> I think it's very common for people to start with a sample instance and then
> create a schema for it. In fact, the sample instance is often a better way
> of communicating the structure than the schema itself.

That only works for fairly simple vocabularies. As soon as you start having
choices, optional/sequence elements/attributes, the number of separate
instances required to "show" the vocabulary becomes unmanageable. Plus this
approach has a negative side effect of people stopping to care how their
schemas look since nobody is supposed to look inside.

I think for any non-trivial vocabulary it is better to start with a clean
and readable schema right away and maybe have one or two sample instance
documents that showcase the most common scenarios.

Boris

-- 
Boris Kolpackov, Code Synthesis Tools   http://codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog
Open source XML data binding for C++:   http://codesynthesis.com/products/xsd
Mobile/embedded validating XML parsing: http://codesynthesis.com/products/xsde