XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1

[Simon St.Laurent]

Michael Kay wrote:
>So the model should be:
>
>* Element-type inherits from Element-type (many to one, or
>many to many if you prefer)
>* Element-type has Attribute-Type (one-to-many)
>* Attribute-type belongs to Domain (many-to-one)

I'm looking forward to this kind of model in XSchema 2.0.  For right now, 
rather than moving up to a more abstract model, I'm trying to stick with the 
extremely concrete world of elements and attributes as they presently exist, 
atomized and disjointed as they may seem.

I think most of the dreams that people have brought up in this discussion, 
including the one above, are eminently achievable.  The key is building 
referenceable and extensible structures.  XSchema 1.0, so far, seems very 
usable in this regard, though not especially elegant. (The concrete world 
weighs heavily.) 

The reason this less-than-100%-elegant exercise is valuable, in my mind at 
least, is that we're providing schemas in a form that can be easily referenced 
(through XPointers, mostly) and extended.  Simply tagging elements in a way 
that they can be referenced opens the way for future work in inheritance, 
extension, and different means for specifying constraints and content.

I'd like XSchema to provide a foundation for all that; so far it seems like 
we've got a good shot at it.

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


xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)