Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
I was just looking over Sean McGrath's fine blog, and noted this: http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2003_09_14_seanmcgrath_archive.html# 10639589639410483 Compact non-XML syntaxes seem like a good - and growing idea. Way back in 1998 I posted this, at the start of a process that turned into XSchema/DDML: http://www.simonstl.com/articles/xmldtd2doc.txt I really liked the idea of using XML documents to describe XML structures, but at this point, I'm thinking it was a serious wrong turn in the development of schemas. It's not necessarily a terrible idea - XML versions of schemas are sometimes quite useful for transformations and some kinds of processing - but compact syntaxes make a lot more sense if you're creating schemas. I spent the morning working with a friend of mine who called with a "Help! How do I write an XML Schema?" question. We worked through the information model he had, used RELAX NG Compact Syntax to describe it, and everything was convenient, human-interpretable, and quite lovely. Then, of course, we used Trang to turn it into a W3C XML Schema, but the good part was the RELAX NG Compact Syntax.
|
