namespace coercion may not interoperate because of parser inconsistency

Greetings xmlschema-dev-ers,

I believe I wrote about one of these situations before, but I thought I would add a second issue, and reiterate the first.  It is regarding namespace coercion.  I do like how powerful this technique is but find parser implementation maddeningly inconsistent.  I have a suite of about a half dozen parsers that I test with to make sure our schemas are interoperable.  However, they implement namespace coercion inconsistently.  For other reasons, we are moving to a different namespace usage, but our experience has taught us some things about this technique that I wanted to share (and hopefully save others the manual hair loss at trying to figure this out).

Here are the scenarios.


Scenario 1 - one slave, two nested masters

schema A (ns="A")  
          imports B (ns="B") 
          includes C (ns="")

schema B (ns="B") 
          includes C (ns="")

In this case, you want schema C to be coerced into both the A namespace and B namespace in schema A. Some parsers coerce into both, others only into one of the namespaces.

Scenario 2 - two slaves, one master

schema D (ns="D")  
          includes E (ns="")

schema E (ns="") 
          includes F (ns="")

In this case, you simply want everything (E and F) to be coerced into the D namespace, the slaves are merely nested.  Some parsers coerce both the nested dependents, others will only coerce the first level, or E only.

FYI.

Cheers,

Paul Kiel
HR-XML