Re: Five mechanical approaches to make an XSD profile without getting bogged by individual issues

Rick, you imply that the Note produced by the databindings WG calls for 
subsetting of XSD.  Consistent with the summary of their mandate that I 
gave in an earlier email, it does not.  Quoting from the introduction [1], 
constraining XSD in that way is an explicit nongoal:


"This specification provides a basic set of example [XML Schema 1.0] 
constructs and types in the form of concrete [XPath 2.0] expressions. 
These patterns are known to work well with state of the art databinding 
implementations.

"Authors of [XML Schema 1.0] documents may find these patterns useful in 
providing a better user experience for consumers of their schemata using 
databinding tools. Whilst it is not possible to guarantee that schemata 
produced using these patterns will give a good user experience with the 
universal set of databinding tools, the patterns contained in this 
specification have been all been tested with a number of different tools 
covering a variety of different programming languages and environments.

"Implementers of databinding tools may find these patterns useful to 
represent simple and common place data structures. Ensuring tools 
recognize at least these simple [XML Schema 1.0] patterns and present them 
in terms most appropriate to the specific language, database or 
environment will provide an improved user experience when using 
databinding tools. >>>It is inappropriate to use this specification to 
constrain implementation of the [XML Schema 1.0] Recommendation.<<< 
[Emphasis mine...Noah]"

So, as I described earlier, this note provides a listing of patterns that 
were known at the time to work particularly well with then available 
databinding tools.  This note was positioned as a recommendation, not to 
those who would subset future versions of the XSD Recommendation, but to 
those would be building databinding and other tools in the future.  The 
XSD working group did not act on this as an instruction to subset XSD, in 
my opinion, in part because it explicitly is not intended for that 
purpose.   As others have noted, the Charter of the XML Schema Working 
group in the period in question did not call for producing such a subset.

Noah

[1] 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-xmlschema-patterns-20090505/#Introduction

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
Sent by: www-tag-request@w3.org
05/29/2009 06:42 AM
 
        To:     www-tag@w3.org
        cc:     (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        Re: Five mechanical approaches to make an XSD 
profile without getting   bogged by individual issues


Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> It lead to the creation of the XML Schema Patterns for Databinding
> Working Group [1].
>
> That group published a number of drafts of specifications called _Basic
> XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Version 1.0_ [2] and _Advanced XML
> Schema Patterns for Databinding_ 1.0 [3], and then ran out of
> committed person-power and closed.
> 
Actually, they are now out as Group Notes.
http://www.w3.org/TR/#Notes

Do you see that this looks like making it someone else's problem, then 
ignoring the result?

I may have missed it, but in what way did the XSD WG use these notes or 
drafts? Surely since it came out of an XSD WG workshop, I would imagine 
that the XSD WG would have considered themselves the primary users of 
such an effort, and they would have tried to fold the emerging results 
of the draft into XSD 1.1 at every opportunity.
 
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

Received on Tuesday, 2 June 2009 03:10:44 UTC