- From: <Joe.Misner@ivans.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 09:29:16 -0400 (EDT)
- To: xmlschema-dev@w3.org
Thank you for the prompt reply. I agree that your solution would solve the problem that I described. However, it raises two other issues in my mind, one practical and the other legal/philosophical: 1. The practical problem: What if companyB wants to require its trading partners to provide specific EXTENDED content, rather than restricted content, in their instances of TypeA? As I understand it, xsd:redefine only supports restrictions. It is certainly a real-world case that a specific user of a vertical-market standard may need additional data in a type defined by a third party that he wishes to require from his trading partners. 2. The legal/philosophical problem: I had always thought that the sole purpose of xsd:redefine was to allow a single organization to evolve the definition of its own schemas over time without having to publish complete replacement documents. That (I thought) was why its use was restricted to the same namespace as the original schema. I also thought that xsd:import was the sole sanctioned way for one organization to make use of another organization's schema, and that it intentionally provided "read-only" access to the components defined in the external schema. Aren't there big problems with intellectual property issues if one organization targets another organization's namespace and redefines it? Wouldn't it create chaos in a large marketplace if there were numerous (re)definitions of the same namespace circulating around the web? Isn't it conceivable or even likely that OrgA may make its schema available to users on a contractual read-only basis, so that they can import it but not redefine it? If OrgA's namespace name is derived from a registered Internet name which might even be trademarked, can other parties just freely redefine it? Consider if the xsd namespace itself were redefined by numerous users. Who could then say anything definitive about the semantics of the various xsd elements? Wouldn't your solution create similar chaos in a vertical market?
Received on Thursday, 12 September 2002 09:45:44 UTC