[Bug 11179] minor editorial improvement : parent schema components of a named model group

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11179

--- Comment #5 from C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com> 2011-02-08 15:16:07 UTC ---
Is there any property of XSD schemas that makes it difficult or impossible to
solve the problem of working with documents conforming to multiple overlapping
schemas?  Or is the difficulty Michael Kay alludes to just a consequence of the
rules imposed (or assumptions made) by XSLT 2.0?

It seems to me that if we are to use qualified names to identify things of
interest (like the definitions of types and elements), and if those things of
interest may vary (so that what we regard as a single element may be defined
differently in different formal definitions of a vocabulary), then the unique
definition of an element or type requires a triple (the qualified name of the
element or type, and some third item -- perhaps the URI of a schema, or perhaps
the URI of a schema document.   Some people have favored -- some perhaps still
favor -- a view in which the qualified name of the element or type suffices to
identify a single formal definition.  In the world at large, that position
became untenable when the Web community decided to give the different flavors
of (X)HTML the same namespace; it might have been easier to adopt that view if
XPath and other technologies had made it easy to write "html:p" and match the
'p' element in any of an enumerated list of HTML namespaces, but they didn't,
and I'm benefiting from hindsight:  I don't remember anyone suggesting at the
time that this would help.  

XSD reflects the explicit assumption that the world may have more than one
formal definition, in XSD, of the same expanded name. I agree that it's a
problem that schema-aware transformations work from the contrary premise but am
unsure what the XSD spec of the XML Schema WG can do about it.  Surely the
world would be a better place if we had had more success helping other WGs
understand the XSD spec and how best to use it (assuming, of course, that we
know how best to use it); we might have had better success in that if we had
made the spec easier to understand and use in the first place.  But really I
think the variability of definitions for qualified names is one of the places
where XSD has been clearest (by its lights) all along.

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Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2011 15:16:09 UTC