[XML-SIG] XML-SCHEMA

[Andy Heath]

> XML Authority is a graphical DTD/schema authoring tool, not a
> programming language. I don't think that XML schema support in
> Python/XML would get you any closer to having a graphical authoring tool
> that works on Linux.

This is true but it isn't just authoring tools its applications,
translations and so on.
In my particular area its things like ed. content packagers that rely
on collections of externally (i.e. via links) defined schemas over which
the application has no control.


> XML schemas are marginally better than DTDs at abstraction but I think
> that both have a fatal flaw in that their abstraction mechanisms only
> work on the tree data structure and do nothing for links. What real
> application does not rely on links?

Exactly.  I guess rather than abstraction I should have talked about
different groups  of people doing different things (writing
different schemas) in different places, but in many circumstances
this is not so different from abstraction, which is the way I was
thinking about it.
For example one may wish to have ed. content whose structure is defined
by
several referenced (elswhere) schemas in some complicated arrangement
where pieces described by different schemas are intermingled
in some complicated, probably nested, way.

Andy

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Andy Heath    Home:+44 (0)114 2885738   a.k.heath@open.ac.uk
Center for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards