XSchema current status - 6/9/98

[Simon St.Laurent]

I missed doing this yesterday, but we seem to have resolved some key issues 
this morning, so hopefully that's okay.

More information about XSchema, including the latest drafts, is available at 
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/xschema.  Please don't reply publicly to this message 
- instead, reply to the subjects provided in the report.

Draft Specification Status:
A complete second draft of Section 1.0 is available for comment. 
[Reply to subject Re: XSchema Spec, Section 1.0 (Draft 2)]

A second draft of sections 2.0 and 2.1 is in progress.  Questions remain 
regarding metadata for the XSchema root element itself.  I'm currently 
planning to leave most of them to be solved in the Doc element.  
[Reply to subject Re: XSchema Spec, Sections 2.0 and 2.1 (Draft 1)]

Sections 2.3 and 2.4 are in progress.

If anyone would like to adopt a section of the outline, please contact me 
privately.

Questions:
We seem to have moved on from these general questions to the details of the 
spec.  In large part, this is thanks to the efforts of John Cowan and Ron 
Bourret in moving ahead with DTD creation.  The questions are repeated below 
with the conclusions reached as I understand them.  Drafts should provide the 
main current of conversation from here on out.

We have four questions in current circulation:

1)How will XSchema use/relate to RDF? 
[Was subject Re: XSchema Question 1: RDF]

In designing XSchemas, we should leave RDF syntax out of the way but 
definitely keep in mind what Tim Bray said:
>But it is easy to tell if something can easily be made into RDF.  Here's
>the test: if what you are building can be expressed as a bunch of 3-tuples
>
>(object, propertyname, propertyvalue)
>
>then it's RDF-able.


2)How will XSchema use namespaces? 
[Was subject  Re: XSchema Question 2: Namespaces]

Namespaces will be used throughout the XSchema draft. For now I'm using XSC as 
the prefix (yes, I know it doesn't matter.)  The namespace name (which does 
matter) will be xschema.org, courtesy of James Tauber, who got to the name 
before I did.  There will be a discussion of the use of namespaces to make 
certain that users can figure out how to use this without tripping over 
multiple standards documents.


3)Should XSchema provide internal and external subsets, as do XML DTD's?
[Was Re: XSchema Question 3: Internal/External subsets]

This question seems to have settled down - for XSchema 1.0 ONLY - to a no.  
It's functionality people want, but it doesn't seem likely for this iteration 
because of the complexity of resolving conflicts.


4)Should the use of traditional DTD entity (and other) notation be encouraged 
in the design, development, and use of XSchemas?
[Was Re: XSchema Question 4: XML 1.0/XSchema interactions]

There wasn't much interest on this one, but the recent discussions of entities 
have brought it back. It looks like anything you can do in a well-formed 
document, including the traditional DOCTYPE notations, will be encouraged.  
We're still sorting out the delightful issue of XSchemas and DTD validation 
when used together.

5)Do we want to provide additional information in the XSchema root element 
regarding XSchema version, for instance? We could add "version='0.1'" or 
something.
[Was subject: XSchema Question 5: Root elment issues; is now subject Re: 
XSchema Spec, Sections 2.0 and 2.1 (Draft 1)]

This is still open, but discussion on it has moved to discussion of the draft. 
No one seemed interested, so I wrote something for everyone to shoot at.  
Seems to have worked to some extent.

6)Question: Should entity support be provided in XSchema?
[Was XSchema Question 6: Entities]

Seems to have resolved into a NO for XSchema 1.0 under the "Re: Entities in 
XSchema" thread.


Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer / Cookies


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