Re: XML Schema usage statistics (WAS: Draft minutes of 2009-05-12 TAG weekly)

> It would be interesting to have a comparison of the # of specifications 
> that use XSD, RNC, or RNG as part of the spec text.

Yes.  I've been working with some of my IBM contacts to see if we can get 
information that would hold up as factual.  Based on early rough checks of 
which standards groups are doing what, by far the most common choices we 
see are to use either just XSD, or in quite a few cases, XSD for 
structural constraints, with Schematron for higher level constraints 
(business rules, I presume, but I haven't checked.)  RelaxNG is used as 
the normative schema for a few standards that we found (ATOM, Docbook, 
TEI, XHTML 2.0), but was far less common than either XSD or XSD+Schematron 
based on the information we have so far.

I understand that the above is too informal to be convincing, and I'm 
trying to see whether we can get some information that might be a bit more 
reliable.

> Plus ~1000 in RNC (Compact) format.

OK.  On the other hand, I was somewhat amused to note that a few of the 
hits on *.rng were actually for something to do with random number 
generators (probably not enough to significantly skew the numbers, but I 
got a chuckle out of it).  It's quite possible there are some false 
positives for .xsd as well.

Still, I think there's at least strong circumstantial evidence supporting 
the intuition that XSD is, both with regard to schema documents available 
from the Web using HTTP, and as a base technology used by other XML 
standards, by far the predominant XML schema language, with Schematron not 
uncommonly used as a supporting technology.  I'm quite confident that the 
same would be true regarding business use of XML.

Noah


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








Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
Sent by: www-tag-request@w3.org
05/18/2009 04:25 AM
 
        To:     Paul Cotton <Paul.Cotton@microsoft.com>
        cc:     "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>, (bcc: Noah 
Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        Re: XML Schema usage statistics (WAS:  Draft 
minutes of 2009-05-12  TAG  weekly)


Paul Cotton wrote:
> From the draft May 12 TAG minutes:
> 
>> raman: XML Schema hasn't worked out very well. I'm skeptical that it 
> really dominates
> ...
>> timbl: Skeptical about preponderance of XSD usage, would like to see 
some 
> figures
>> noah: Any volunteers?
>> (silence)
> 
> Searching Google code for .xsd files (
http://www.google.ca/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=file%3A.*%5C.xsd%24) finds 
44,800 files.
> 
> Searching Google code for .rng files (
http://www.google.ca/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=file%3A.*%5C.rng%24) finds 
only 3,000 files.
> 
> Not necessarily a reliable survey but it certainly indicates that in 
publicly visible code stores indexed by "Google code" .xsd file occurrence 
is significantly greater than that of Relax NG files. 
> 
> Personal opinion: I expect that the ratio in enterprise systems whose 
code stores are not visible to a tool like "Google code" that this ratio 
would be even more slanted towards XML Schema.
> 
> /paulc
> ...

Plus ~1000 in RNC (Compact) format.

It would be interesting to have a comparison of the # of specifications 
that use XSD, RNC, or RNG as part of the spec text.

BR, Julian

Received on Monday, 18 May 2009 16:10:14 UTC