RE: Latest draft and Schema / DTD

My company, Commerce One, is an active participant in the W3C Schema effort
and has contributed it's own schema language "SOX" to the effort. However we
recognize that the W3C schema language will eventually supercede our own.

It is also fully our intention to use a "schema" version of the DTD
resulting from this working group in our future products. The main advantage
of this will be in validating the XML instance against the schema definition
in a simpler and more reliable way as well as enabling us to use the
software tools we use to manipulate "regular" XML business documents to
manipulate the signature as well.

We also think that it is possible to develop a single definition of an XML
document that can be represented either as a DTD or a Schema in fact we're
doing this right now to generate DTD, SOX and XDR versions of the same
document definition. All it takes is a little care to make sure they are
compatible and make good use of  schema functionality.

My conclusion is that we need both DTD and Schema representations of the
signature document ... and that it should be the responsibility of this
group to develop them.

So, given the current timing of the W3C and signature efforts would it not
make sense, early next year, to include in our plan the development of a
revised version of the dsig specification that additionally includes a W3C
schema as well as a DTD version?

The DTD definition would probably need to include additional
validation/datatyping rules that were handled automatically by the schema
version. It would mean though that people could then choose to use which
ever type defintion (DTD or Schema) that was the most appropriate.

We could use interoperability testing of different solutions based on each
approach to help prove comaptibility.

Thoughts?

David Burdett
PS I think that schemas will become the primary way of defining documents in
a very short timescale.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Berners-Lee [mailto:timbl@w3.org]
Sent: Friday, November 12, 1999 11:50 AM
To: Winchel 'Todd' Vincent, III; Joseph M. Reagle Jr.; Donald E.
Eastlake 3rd
Cc: IETF/W3C XML-DSig WG; leg-xml-l
Subject: Re: Latest draft and Schema / DTD



-----Original Message-----
From: Winchel 'Todd' Vincent, III <Winchel@mindspring.com>
To: Joseph M. Reagle Jr. <reagle@w3.org>; Donald E. Eastlake 3rd
<dee3@torque.pothole.com>
Cc: IETF/W3C XML-DSig WG <w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org>; leg-xml-l
<leg-xml-l@gsulaw.gsu.edu>; timbl@w3.org <timbl@w3.org>
Date: Friday, November 12, 1999 11:33 AM
Subject: Re: Latest draft and Schema / DTD


[..]

>Now, if I understand correctly, you are saying that using XML DTDs to
>validate XML documents is the wrong way to go (contrary to the message of
>the last two years) and now I (and everyone else) have to switch to XML
>schemas and use the phantom tools that exists to make it happen.

No, just you -  not everyone else.  ;-) Just us. In working within the W3C
you have
an obligation which an average user does not, to ensure that the
new technology all fits together.  This is perhaps more explicit in the W3C
than in the IETF.   Any large organzation or community can splinter very
easily
if there are not checks to ensure that everything indeed converges.

Tim BL

Received on Friday, 12 November 1999 15:17:00 UTC