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Tim Bray writes:
> So I say to you all: go back in your caves and come out with
> *one* schema facility that lets me write grammars when I want
> to and xpath expressions when I want to, and has an elegantly
> unified syntax. Then declare victory. For extra credit,
> replace entities too (just kidding). -Tim
I'm going to take up my wand and play my old role of layering-fairy
again. I think that a couple of points are obvious:
1. There are different levels at which people want to write schemas:
raw elements and attributes (i.e. XML Schema), generic entities and
relationships (i.e. RDF Schema), domain-specific data (i.e. XBRL),
etc.
2. An enormous part of the infrastructure for grammatical schemas is
the same whether you're using a schema to describe raw markup or
higher-level items like objects or accounting entries.
Ideally, then, we'd want a layer to capture what most grammatical
schemas have in common (i.e. a generic schema Namespace), and then
allow the differences to be layered on top (i.e. the XML structure
Namespace, the entity-relationship Namespace, etc.).
It may or may not be too late for that. In any case, I'm not
volunteering.
All the best,
David
--
David Megginson david@m...
http://www.megginson.com/
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