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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> Both BizTalk and the recent XML Schema draft
use the namespace identifier as the schema identifier.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>However, BizTalk says that people *must* use XML
Data for their schemas. So BizTalk documents cannot use XML Schema documents,
and vice versa, unless both XML Schema and BizTalk/XML-Data are considered
selective transformations of some other document type which has the namespaces
in some schema neutral format. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In the absense of a schema invocation mechanism
(e.g., a version of the style sheet PI for schemas) that seperates
Namespace identifiers from particular schemas (and therefore allows multiple
schemas), both XML Schemas and BizTalk/XML-Data capture your data to particular
paradigms. For BizTalk this is marginally more understandable: BizTalk frames
itself as a wrapper, but then doesn't allow any flexibility in the schema
language for the body: in other words, if you use BizTalk, you have to use
XML-Data.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>This means that developers who require a degree of
portability should maintain their documents using some schema-independent
namespace, and only attach the namespace for a particular schema when the
document is generated for a particular purposes. BizTalk could have allowed
multiple schemas with XML-Data as the default; this would have allowed a lot of
competition inside the wrapper/routing framework. But they didn't: is it a
framework or a straightjacet?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In other words, namespaces are dead (for database
documents) as ways of uniquely naming elements independent of any other
considerations. They are now
"name-in-a-particular-schema-in-a-particular-schema-language--spaces".</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Congratulations to all concerned.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The practical question is now what to do? Should we
just lay down and die; should we go back to architectural forms; should we
invent a parallel namespace PI that is concerned with uniquely identifying names
and not with tieing elements to a schema? </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The first thing that is required is for W3C to
create a Schema PI, in a similar fashion to the Stylesheet PI. In the absense of
that mechanism, the Devourers can excuse themselves that there is nothing else
to use for invoking schemas apart from namespaces.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>This is a matter of urgency and should take
priority over all XML Schema activities, IMHO.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Rick Jelliffe</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>