[REBOL] Re: The XML Schema compiler
From: bry:itnisk at: 11-Nov-2002 16:22
>> 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.
Right, unfortunately as I was trying to clarify you cannot describe
every possible XML data-structure using XSD.
The first time I every used XSD it was for a Human Rights project where
we were sending SOAP messages describing Human Rights abuses, I won't go
into the tedious details but in twenty minutes I came across a situation
in which my rather mundane xml design pattern could not be matched via
XSD. This was not caused by my unfamiliarity with the language as
several experts acknowledged that it could not be done using straight
XSD and I could always try to extend the language using Schematron(as
what I wanted required a correlation between various xpaths on
elements).
This has undoubtedly colored my opinion of XSD, any language that fails
me in a simple situation such as this one most definetly was in less
than an hour of working with it, while at the same time being defined in
a specification of several hundred pages is obviously not the tool for
the job. The job in my opinion being to describe xml structures.
As the original post in the thread was about the advisability of
building an XSD to Rebol compiler my post on the subject is a perhaps
overlong rant against the idea. :)
>> 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.
Agreed, I would rather use Rebol's datatypes than XSD, hence my argument
against an XSD to Rebol compiler.
>The question is: Is data-format-validation a XML property or a
>reader/emitter property? I vote for the second option.
Hey I vote for the second option as well.
>> 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 :-).
I understand that a lot of people don't like XSLT, it most certainly
takes a good deal of time to learn to use it to it's best abilities. I
think once people have learned this they will find it an extremely
useful tool for processing Xml trees.
