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

John Kemp writes:

> Can you simply describe (by listing specific technical items) what 
> would be needed to profile XSD 1.1 in order to create "XSD Lite"? Is
> that what you are looking to do?

Rick:  I would also find it useful if you could outline what you see as 
the requirements and success criteria for such an XSD Lite profile.  For 
example:

* Is there a requirement that an XSD Lite implementation accept some 
subset of existing XSD 1.0 schemas.  If so, for which user communities, 
etc.?

* Are there a particular set of end-user use cases at which XSD Lite 
should be targeted, and briefly, how do those relate to the use cases for 
XSD 1.0 or XSD 1.1?  By end-user use cases I mean, are there communities 
using XML for, say, network communication, document creation, etc. that 
you view as the ones who would use XSD Lite in preference to full XSD, 
RelaxNG, etc.?

* Are there infrastructure-related use csaes or requirements that you have 
in mind?  An example of such a use case might be:  XSD Lite must be 
capable of integrating with Schematron in some particular way;   XSD Lite 
must be usable in place of full XSD in conjunction with XQuery and XPath 
2.0, at least for some purposes; etc.  These are just examples, but one of 
the (good) reasons that people refactor and relayer specifications is to 
promote such modular reuse, and I'm wondering whether there are 
requirements of that sort for your proposed XSD Lite?

I would find it easier to evaluate the pros and cons of particular 
proposals you make for a profile, such as not supporting explicit 
complexTypes in XSD Lite, if they could be evaluated against a set of 
goals and requirements. 

I think the above are the sorts of questions that should be addressed if a 
significant new effort is to be chartered.  Most of the best W3C (and 
other) standards efforts I've seen have done a good job of stating use 
cases and requirements separately from proposed solutions.  BTW:  I 
wouldn't claim that XSD 1.0 did a particularly good job of this, but I 
think that with respect to most of the 1.1 enhancements that's been done 
at least reasonably well;  interestingly, there are many many examples on 
the xmlschema-dev@w3.org in which some XSD user asked a question alont the 
lines of "I'm using XSD and I want to do XXX", where the answer is "That's 
difficult or impossible for XSD 1.0, but straightforward in XSD 1.1."  I 
think that's at least good annecdotal evidence that at least some of the 
features in XSD 1.1 are urgently awaited by current users of XSD 1.0.

Thank you.

Noah

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








John Kemp <john.kemp@nokia.com>
Sent by: www-tag-request@w3.org
05/21/2009 10:31 AM
 
        To:     ext Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
        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)


On May 21, 2009, at 10:17 AM, ext Rick Jelliffe wrote:

[...]

>
> Sorry, but saying,
> in effect, "we have no real metric for stopping adding features" is no
> reason for not
> having a profile: indeed,  the bloated standards generated by that
> approach surely must
> need a profile in short measure.

Can you simply describe (by listing specific technical items) what 
would be needed to profile XSD 1.1 in order to create "XSD Lite"? Is 
that what you are looking to do?

Regards,

- johnk

Received on Thursday, 21 May 2009 15:03:56 UTC