XML Schema 1.1: Open Issues?

Dear W3C XML Schema Working Group,

  Regarding http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xmlschema11-2-20060217/ I would
appreciate clarification regarding the following matters.

It is not clear to me which, if any, Technical Reports the Working Group
published between May 2005 and January 2006, or if the Working Group did
not publish updated Technical Reports in this timeframe, where I could
find public status reports with rationale why new drafts have not been
published. For the document in particular it seems between February 2005
and January 2006 no drafts have been published. http://w3.org/XML/Schema
does not even note publication of this draft.

Regarding my earlier XML Schema 1.1 issue,

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2006JanMar/0045.html

I was not able to find the response that formally addresses this issue
in my inbox, the list archive, or Bugzilla. Where can I find publicly
archived evidence that the Working Group formally addressed this issue?

Regarding older comments I have some interest in,

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xmlschema-dev/2001Oct/0219.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2002OctDec/0084.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2002OctDec/0096.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2004AprJun/0084.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2005OctDec/0212.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2005OctDec/0213.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2006JanMar/0133.html

The issues is simply that it's not clear how QNames without a prefix are
to be interpreted. This issue has been raised on the XML Schema Part 2
REC, PER, XML Schema 1.1 Part 2 WD, along with numerous requests to
finally make the normative corrections to XML Schema Part 2 that have
been repeatedly promised by the Working Group. Looking at the Last Call
draft, it seems this issue has still not been addressed, and I could not
find responses that formally address any of the issues mentioned above
in a meaningful way. Regardless of whether this is still an issue for
the last call draft, it's not really acceptable to not address the issue
for more than 4 1/2 years now. As I've said before.

Another issues that still has not been addressed and still is an issue
for the Last Call draft is

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2004OctDec/0014.html

Again, nothing has been done about this issue, and the Last Call draft
has exactly the same conformance and inaccessibility problem the REC had
before it.

Looking further at the SotD section of the document, I see there is
a link to http://www.w3.org/XML/2006/01/public-bugzilla to explain
Bugzilla issue tracking. The document is not even well-formed XML and
appears to discuss issue tracking for other Working Groups, for example,
the "pre-prepared" links don't show XML Schema issues. In

  http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&product=XML+Schema

I then found 244 open issues on XML Schema, more than 230 of these were
opened before the Last Call announcement. It seems that some issues
might have been resolved and the issue tracker hasn't been updated,
while other issues are still open. It is not clear to me how this could
have happened during the preparation of the Last Call announcement.

The next note in the SotD is

  The end of the Last Call review period is 31 March 2006; comments
  received after that date will be considered if time allows, but no
  guarantees can be offered.

It is not clear to me what this means. It seems this should be

  The end of the Last Call review period is 31 March 2006. The Working
  Group will formally address any and all substantive review comments
  received during the beginning of the Last Call review period and the
  beginning of the Proposed Recommendation review period, and respond
  to any and all issues received after that point.

As it stands, the note gives the impression that the XML Schema Working
Group might not formally address certain comments between LC and PR.

A quick look at the document suggests there are dozens of errors that
could have easily been found and fixed before making a Last Call
announcement, for example, appendix J.1 has a normative reference to
RFC 2396 which is never used in the document; the informative references
to RFC 3986 and RFC 3987 are used; the document notes references have
been updated, but it seems the actual change is that anyURI is now, from
the perspective of conformance, equivalent to string, which is never
noted anywhere in the draft.

So it's not clear at all what the Working Group might have meant to
change here, which makes reviewing the document quite difficult. This is
similar for other references, e.g. the "Character Model" reference is
listed as informative reference, but never used in the document.

Given this, it seems the document is not ready for Last Call and should
be returned to the Working Group for further work. So I'd like to have
clarification regarding the issues above and why the Working Group
considered a Last Call announcement the appropriate next step for the
document. At the moment, I don't think there is much point in reviewing
the document, people would just raise many already known issues again,
which means more work for the Working Group and reviewers for no real
reason.

Thanks,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Sunday, 5 March 2006 00:53:08 UTC