- From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>
- Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 18:54:58 +0100
- To: xmlschema-dev@w3.org
Hi Jeni, Jeni Tennison wrote: > > Yes. My feeling is that when you design a markup language, you should > pay more attention to the ease with which documents in that markup > language can be created and processed than to whether the constraints > that you want to express can be expressed in a particular schema > language. If a validatable structure is a big requirement for the > markup language, then great, try to make it fit in with the schema > language you've chosen, but if not, the main role of a schema is > documentation and often natural language is as good a definition > language as anything. I does more than agree and I would say that, even if "a validatable structure is a big requirement for the markup language" you may consider defining a flexible vocabulary and a (strict) canonical form which can be validated by any schema language (including W3C XML Schema and even DTDs). You can of course also publish the canonicalization process as a XSLT transformation to be perfomed on instance documents before validation. The only caveat for this is that the chain (transformation / validation) is not natively supported by XML tools such as editors, but otherwise I think that it's a great way to abstract your vocabulary from schema technologies. > The reason Schematron is so useful is that while other languages are > limited in their grammar, Except Examplotron ;=) ... but I have to admit I have borrowed the idea and the ending of the name from Schematron. > XPath expressions are able to articulate > quite a lot of the rules that natural language can articulate about > XML structures. But there are some aspects of validation that just > aren't testable without a semantic understanding of the role of the > XML document. My 0,02 Euros. Eric -- Rendez-vous à Paris pour le Forum XML. http://www.technoforum.fr/Pages/forumXML01/index.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric van der Vlist http://xmlfr.org http://dyomedea.com http://xsltunit.org http://4xt.org http://examplotron.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 9 November 2001 12:55:04 UTC