[topicmapmail] XML Schema to XTM

[Murray Altheim]

Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> Kal Ahmed wrote:
>
>>If you are trying to write schemas without checking them through XSV I 
>>would say you have bigger problems to worry about ;-), but I see your 
>>point - feel free to play with the XSLTs. I would just ask that if you 
>>do tidy some stuff up you can make the updated stylesheet available 
>>under the same license terms.
> 
> I'd start off settling for just a subset of xsd.  There are too many 
> features that are so hard to understand and implement that no three (and 
> sometimes no two) schema validators agree on their validity.  Even 
> though you are not doing validation, that indicates how hard some of the 
> features can be to understand.
> 
> Also, don't forget about handling schema imports, and differences 
> between default qualified and default unqualified elements.

You know, way back when, I was asked by the chair of the XML Schema
WG to do a public review of XSD. I didn't want to on grounds that
I didn't think I could provide anything positive, and I considered
the chair a friend of mine (still do). I asked my supervisors at
Sun and they told me I should -- so I did. I gave it a very bad,
in-depth review. Tore it a new one, as they say in Missouri and parts
of Oklahoma. I don't think that many people who were religiously
involved with XSD took it very seriously.

Well, I don't feel so bad no more, durn if I feel downright vindicated.
I looked a few days ago on the W3C HTML WG site and they *still*
haven't got an XSD version for XHTML. After what, four years? And
HTML isn't really a very difficult markup language. So maybe we can
now all just move on to other things... like RELAX-NG, which all
along seemed like a more reasonable schema language. I note there's
still no alternative to character entities (apart from just using
Unicode UTF-8 directly).

Now if I could just get people to take my opinions about RDF seriously.

Murray the Righteous

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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