- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: 30 Dec 1999 13:26:23 +0000
- To: Bob Kline <bkline@rksystems.com>
- Cc: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@mitre.org>, xml-dev@ic.ac.uk, www-xml-schema-comments@w3c.org, "Schneider,John C." <jcs@mitre.org>, "Cokus,Michael S." <msc@mitre.org>
[Thread wrt instance->schema connections, lack of rigidity thereof]
With apologies for the 'turgid prose' of the draft in this area, let
me try to explain why flexibility IN THE REC in this area is a Good
Thing:
Schemas are a powerful and useful mechanism, with a wide range of
possible deployment scenarios. Different schemas may usefully be
employed with respect to the same instance document for different
purposes, all legitimate. 'xsi:schemaLocation' is a means by which a
document author can signal A location for A schema with respect to
which s/he warrents the instance at hand is schema-valid. It will
often be appropriate for schema-aware processors to exploit this
information. But it may not always be possible (the processor may be
offline) or appropriate (the processor may have other schema-based
processing in view) to do so. We have tried in the current draft to
indicate that 'xsi:schemaLocation' is the preferred, inter-operable
means by which instances signal schemas to processors, WITHOUT making
this connection make-or-break mandatory.
A moment's thought about experience with XML's instance->DTD linkage
will perhaps suggest some benefits of this approach: as it stands, if
I wish to validate an XML instance which references no external DTD, I
have to edit it to incorporate a suitable DOCTYPE declaration. Even
if the document has a DOCTYPE, if the URL it references is unavailable
or out-of-date, I again must have recourse to a text editor to fix
this. We've tried to do better for XML Schema. Another experience
we've tried to learn from is the instance->stylesheet one, with
similar lessons we believe.
Hope this helps,
ht
--
Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
Received on Thursday, 30 December 1999 08:26:34 UTC