- From: Arnold, Curt <Curt.Arnold@hyprotech.com>
- Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 10:09:51 -0600
- To: "'www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org'" <www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org>
1. ambiguous use of length I think that length and maxLength should be exclusively used to number of characters used to represent the datatype. A different term (byteCount maybe) should be used to indicate between number of bytes used in the machine representation of the data. For example, <datatype name="temperature"> <basetype name="real"/> <!-- This would indicate that the representation in the XML file should not go beyond 20 characters --> <maxLength>20</maxLength> <!-- This would indicate that DOM access should be done as a R8 --> <byteCount>8</byteCount> </datatype> 2. Additional datatype content (Warning boundaries example) It is useful in many applications to have the concept of inviolatable boundaries and warning boundaries. For example, say you were doing a thermostat temperature setting datatype. Temperature has a lower boundary of 0 K and no upper limit (would be limited to the largest number expressible by the machine representation chosen). The 0 K boundary should be inviolate meaning that any attempt to set a temperature below absolute zero should cause an exception. However, it might be nice to be able to specify a range outside of which the application should confirm the use really meant that setting, but would not stop processing. (I hate it when I accidentially liquify the air in the room) This is probably unreasonable to go into the schema spec, but what I would like is some clean way that I could add additional content to the datatype. I'd also want to indicate that a specific data type in a specific dimensional unit, for example Kelvin. With the current definition, I would have to: 1. Have a base datatype document that I stripped warning boundaries and dimensional units out of before presenting to a validating parser 2. Have a secondary document that linked datatypes with warning boundaries and dimensional units For this additional information, it would be useful to have a "<addendums>" or "<more>" element with any content under the <datatype> element.
Received on Thursday, 1 July 1999 13:02:14 UTC