Re: XML Schema

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On Sat, 23 Jun 2001, John Palmieri wrote:

> Sorry for double posting but my computer's clock was messed up.
>
> I'm getting a little bit of a feel for XML Schema's.  The documentation
> islittered with new terminology that takes a bit getting use to.  The
> examples look straight forward.  I think they are a better way to
> represent the shapes instead of DTD's.  I will work on moving the
> widget.dtd to UrShape.schema once the C++ stuff James is doing hits the

Which C++ stuff is this?  I don't really see the benefit of changing any
of the existing infrastructure over to C++ -- it sounds like a lot of work
for not much gain (people have to learn the new infrastructure, a lot more
work to write language bindings, etc).

> streets.  About the validator - I'm going to fiddle around with this
> (note the fiddle part).  Schema's is a whole other project and the specs
> are just way too complicated for us to be worrying about that.  If
> anything, I might be able to squeeze something out that is tailored to
> our purposes (implements only the types and tags that we use).  I
> suspect that libxml will include support for this in the future since it
> is very useful.  One thing that gets me is the regular expressions.
> What notation of RE are they using? Perl uses different notation from
> python and lex.  Are their libs for this already? Well I don't think
> that we are going to have to use restrictions or unions or any of the
> more complex parts of the spec so I think we can just ignore them.  Well
> I'll create the schema file and see if I want to tackle validating it
> also.  If we get past that we can have it automagicly create a tree to
> conform to our mini-DOM interface.  Comments?

Remember that a dtd or schema is only a very small part of these sort of
changes.  It is just a definition of a file format.  Coding up a new
feature is the hard part (and you will probably find that the file format
needs changing as things are implemented).  Don't spend too much time just
planning things.

James.

-- 
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/