Re: Resolution to CR-17

I do dissent from this decision.  The only possible justification for
ENTITY and NOTATION is compatibility with XML 1.0. NOTATION provides
nothing that cannot be done with elements and attributes.   The fact
that ENTITY and NOTATION are related in XML Schema in a quite different
way than they are related in XML 1.0 demonstrates that compatibility has
not been achieved.  If the ENTITY type in XML Schema is sufficient to
meet the XML 1.0 compatibility requirements on XML Schema, then there is
no need for notation declarations; it would be sufficient for the
NOTATION type to refer to notations declared in the DTD.  The current
design also makes XML Schema Part 2 unnecessarily depend on XML Schema
Part 1, and makes NOTATION unusable by applications XML Schema Part 2
other than XML Schema Part 1.

Alex Milowski wrote:
> 
> Dear James Clark,
> 
> The W3C XML Schema Working Group has spent the last several weeks
> working through the comments received from the public on the
> Candidate Recommendation (CR) of the XML Schema specification. We
> thank you for the comments you made on our specification during
> our CR comment period, and want to make sure you know that all
> comments received during the CR comment period have been recorded
> in our CR issues list (http://www.w3.org/2000/12/xmlschema-crcomments.html).
> 
> You raised the point registered as issue CR-17:
> 
> Title: Entities-and-notations: Remove notation type?
> 
> Description:
> 
> Declared NOTATIONs can be referred to from ENTITY declarations or from
> attribute declarations. As things stand in the CR draft, any notation
> referred to from an ENTITY declaration must be declared in the DTD; any
> notation referred to from an attribute declaration must be declared in the
> schema. (This last means that attribute types ENTITY and NOTATION behave
> differently in a confusing way.)
> 
> Should this design be changed?
> 
> Resolution:
> 
> At its January 2001 meeting in London, the WG voted to open this as an
> outstanding issue.
> 
> In discussion, it proved that there was no support for removing the
> NOTATION type. Notations provide information about otherwise opaque
> objects; they are not limited to entities, and there is no reason to remove
> them from the XML Schema language simply because entities are not in the
> language. It is true that processors which are both schema-aware and
> DTD-aware will need to keep track of two distinct sets of notations;
> notations do not differ, in this way, from many other constructs in schemas
> and DTDs which have analogues in the other formalism.
> 
> The uniqueness constraint on notation names cannot be expressed by our type
> derivation rules; this seems to require that NOTATION be a primitive, not a
> derived type.
> 
> RESOLVED unanimously: to retain NOTATION.
> 
> RESOLVED unanimously: to make NOTATION a primitive, rather than a derived,
> type.
> 
> It would be helpful to us to know whether you are satisfied with the
> decision taken by the WG on this issue, or wish your dissent from the
> WG's decision to be recorded for consideration by the Director of
> the W3C.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Alex Milowski
> XML Schema Working Group

Received on Friday, 9 March 2001 06:56:00 UTC