Re: Wildcards v xsl:stylesheet

James,

As XML Schema 1.0 was nearing completion, you filed a comment
(archived at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/ 
2000OctDec/0216)
suggesting that it would be convenient to be able to write a wildcard
which accepted (say) any element which is both qualified (i.e. has a
namespace URI) and not in the XSL namespace.  At that time, the
Working Group chose not to make any change, and you recorded a "mild
dissent" from the group's decision
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/ 
2001JanMar/0155).

Some time has passed, and I don't know whether you still take any
interest in the issues you raised then against XML Schema 1.0.  But if
you do, I hope you will be pleased by the news that the most recent
working draft of XML Schema 1.1 has the functionality you described
then: a 'notNamespace' attribute and a 'notQName' attribute have been
added to the xsd:any element, with the meanings that the wildcard
matches names which are not in those namespace, and not in that list
of QNames.

Fuller details can be found in section 3.10 of the most recent working
draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#Wildcards).

In your 'mild dissent', you said

     My concern is not so much that this particular bit of
     functionality is missing in 1.0 but rather that you have locked
     yourself in to a syntactic approach that will make it hard to add
     it cleanly in the future. Your current design invents an ad hoc
     non-XML syntax to enable an attribute value to describe a set of
     namespaces.  In general, I would suggest it's a bad approach to
     try and pack structured information into an attribute value: it
     often works at first, but as you try to add more features, it runs
     out of steam and an incresingly baroque and non-orthogonal syntax
     becomes necessary. I think you would be much better off to use
     elements in the content of the "any" element to describe the set
     of namespaces.

We cannot claim to have addressed this concern directly; the revised
wildcard is syntactically similar to the old one.  Whether the
revision shows that your concern was misplaced, or justified, I will
leave for others to judge.

If you still have any interest in this topic, the working group would
be grateful to know whether you believe this revision successfully
addresses your original issue or not.  You will find a record of the
issue and our disposition of it in the W3C's public Bugzilla
installation, at http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=2867
and we would be glad if you added a comment to the issue record
indicating whether you agree, or do not agree, with our resolution of
the issue.  Alternatively, you could reply to this email, which I am
copying to the public comments list.

If we do not hear from you in the next two weeks, we will assume you
agree with the WG decision, or have lost interest in XML Schema,
if not in all XML schema languages.

best regards,

Michael Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Tuesday, 19 September 2006 01:36:04 UTC