- From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 18:11:44 +0200
- To: Hugh Wallis <xmlschema@standarddimensions.com>
- Cc: <xmlschema-dev@w3.org>
On Jun 19, 2006, at 17:37, Hugh Wallis wrote: > Specifically the questions I seek input on are as follows: > > 1) Should implementers of specifications that do not provide > normative schemas for the namespaces they define confine themselves > rigorously to those things that are explicitly defined by the > specification in question That would certainly strike me as a best practice. Are there cases in which this would not work? Also, I would expect that it should be possible to produce one schema document that only has strictly what is in the specification, and another that includes it to add some sugar, e.g. attribute groups. Of course, that still leaves any amount of leeway for incompatibility between schemata for the given namespace, as well as misinterpretations. > 2) Should specification authors provide NORMATIVE schemas for any > namespaces that their specifications define so as to avoid any > possibility of incompatible/non-interoperable implementations > resulting. I think that any W3C WG that produces a vocabulary for XML RFC-2119- SHOULD produce a normative schema for that namespace. This is generally considered good practice but AFAIK is not enforced by the publication process (I don't remember it being mentioned by the QA guidelines either, though I might be forgetting). The problem with the above is that it is all nice and well but it does not address the nest of snakes of which schema language to use, and of whether an XML Schema version should be produced. On the one hand it won't help your problem much if you're using XML Schema and the WG in question only has a RelaxNG schema, on the other hand I would expect much screaming to follow if any single schema language were enforced. Conversion is appealing, but the EXI WG's quick investigations in that area tend to show that there doesn't seem to currently be a tool that can automate schema conversions while guaranteeing that the output schema is correct. -- Robin Berjon Senior Research Scientist Expway, http://expway.com/
Received on Monday, 19 June 2006 16:12:01 UTC