[Bug 2923] Possible conflicts between schemas and instances

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=2923

           Summary: Possible conflicts between schemas and instances
           Product: ITS
           Version: WorkingDraft
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: ITS tagset
        AssignedTo: fsasaki@w3.org
        ReportedBy: vdv@dyomedea.com
         QAContact: public-i18n-its@w3.org


Some schema languages such as W3X XML Schema or RELAX NG have an XML syntax.

When this is the case, schemas can also be considered as instances and there is
no reason why ITS couldn't be used for the internationalization of the schema
itself (ie to localize the annotations and even the names of the elements and
attributes).

Unfortunately, the <its:documentRules/> element appears to have a different
meaning when found in instance documents and in schemas: in instance documents,
the selectors apply to the document itself while in schemas they apply to the
instance documents described by the schema.

I think that this is wrong, not only because one might want to localize schemas
themselves but also because that means that implementations need to be able to
determine if a document is a schema or not to understand the meaning of
<its:documentRules/> elements. If I use <its:documentRules/> in a new schema
language (let's say I want to use it in Examplotron for instance), the
applications will most probably get it all wrong...

To avoid this confusion, I think that it would be safer to distinguish both
cases and one of the solutions to do that would be to use another name (such as
<its:targetDocumentRules/>) for the element when it applies to the instances
described by a schema.

Eric

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2006 09:10:19 UTC