[REBOL] Re: The XML Schema compiler
From: robert:muench:robertmuench at: 11-Nov-2002 13:46
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [rebol-bounce--rebol--com] [mailto:[rebol-bounce--rebol--com]]
> On Behalf Of bryan
> Sent: Monday, November 11, 2002 11:38 AM
> To: [rebol-list--rebol--com]
> Subject: [REBOL] Re: The XML Schema compiler
> NOOOOOO! Sorry to get so agitated but I must start in on this
> before it goes much further. XSD sucks!
Hi, I can second that ;-) and most XML and XSLT stuff sucks too. People
don't get what XML is for and what it's not. Anyway...
> 1. It is difficult to author, the specification is basically
> built for E-Commerce applications that need to use Xml, since it was
> felt in that community that Xml's typeless structure made it
> too difficult to work with in their particular problem domain.
Ironically, the eCommerce community never made it to work with a as much
as possible typeless structure. I always show the REBOL way for
serializing data. It's very easy, very pragmatic and it just works. But
it needs some open-minded people to understand and see this possibility.
> 2. It will not support every possible Xml structure. No doubt
> caused by it's intended use for E-commerce XSD is not
> flexible enough, or at least no one to my knowledge has made
> it work, to describe formats as complex as XSLT.
?? You can wrappe every data-structure into XML if you want. It just
depends on how you "serialize" the datastructure.
> 3. The datatypes supported via XSD, or the datatypes you can
> easily build with it, are extremely limited.
Again, I would use the REBOL way.
> Xml are people trying to validate Money and Dates. What are
> the problems there, well since XSD does not have a currency
> datatype people generally do one of the following:
The question is: Is data-format-validation a XML property or a
reader/emitter property? I vote for the second option.
> 4. There are some complaints from very clever people, such as
> Tim Bray, James Clark, not just that XSD sucks but that parts
> of the specification are incomprehensible and that as a
> consequence one should worry that Schemas written that take
> advantage of the more ersatz elements of the spec will
> perhaps not be portable between different Schema processors.
Oh, remindes me of C++ ;-)) If a standard is so complicated (no matter
if by design-faults or intended) that no-one can make a compliant
processor without great effort, it's time to delete it ;-)).
> Xml schemas are basically Object-Oriented in structure, the
> only situation in which I see an actual benefit to XSD is in
> systems such as .Net where one can do runtime translation
> between the XML Schema datatypes and the supported
> environment datatypes, if we did this in Rebol it might be useful.
IMO that's always necessary, and it's OK. Why should we agree on so much
things? Post your data, let me know what's your understanding (semantic)
of your date, I read it and transform it into my domain.
> If there were to be any sort of code generator I would think
> one for Relax-NG would be preferable -
> http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/.
I have a look, thanks for the tip.
> 2. It will support every possible XML structure including
> complex structures with variant content such as XSLT. May be
> of some use if we want to build an XSLT processor in Rebol ;)
We have REBOL :-). Robert
