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Re: Complex Content Element
Dare Obasanjo wrote:
--- Randy Charles Morin <randy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There are countless tools on the market that would help developers
read and write XML vocabularies correctly. Most all of these are
based on XSDs.
Considering that I not only work at the company that produces the
most technologies that work with W3C XML Schema but probably directly
or indirectly work with on a number of these tools I'm curious as to
what these countless tools and technologies you mention actually
are.
Xopus for example. We chose to build XSD support first because almost
all of out customers are using it. There hasn't been a single customer
that used RelaxNG.
Only a very small subset are based on RelaxNG (or Schematron).
Using RelaxNG is cool, but impractical since almost no tools
actually implement it. In fact, it's highly likely that RelaxNG
will be left behind before ever finding its way into popular
development tools (not a prediction, just a realization that most
specs die ala VRML).
If mainstream adoption is what you want then Atom should be based on
DTDs since they have the widest support amongst XML editing tools
and APIs. I'd assumed that the Atom spec would have a DTD, an XSD
schema and a RELAX NG schema so I'm surprised that there is now
discussion taking place that seems to imply that there will only be
one.
The difference is that everybody has agreed that DTDs are history, and
everywhere I hear that they are going to be replaced. And even though
everybody agrees that XSD is horrible, companies like Microsoft aren't
dropping it.
This isn't about if it's cool to use XSD or RelaxNG. It's about
proper marketing and positioning of your standard.
In the grand scheme of things whether or not Atom is XSD friendly
will have little effect on its marketing and positioning.
I'm not so sure about that.
Forcing order on your elements and making it more deterministic
seems like a small price to pay.
I very much agree.
--
Sjoerd Visscher
http://w3future.com/weblog/