Re: XSchema Question 1: RDF

Alain DESEINE (alain@cabinfo.com)
Wed, 03 Jun 1998 08:49:02 +0200


Ron Bourret wrote:
>
> Tim Bray wrote:
>
> > In fact *every* attempt so far
> > (the old DSD stuff, XML-Data, etc) to express content models in XML has
> > come up verbose and unreadable compared to good ol' 8879 DTD notation.
> > I think there's a better way, and want to see what xml-dev can come up
> > with. -Tim
>
> Regardless of whether XSchema rivals DTD notation for brevity and clarity, we
> still need it. The compelling reason for XSchema is not besting the readability
> of DTD notation -- a visual schema editor is far clearer than both -- but making
> schema information available through XML tools (which are numerous) rather than
> DTD tools (which are not).
>
> For this reason, I would vote against directly using RDF in XSchema, as it means
> we will have designed something we can't use.
>
> -- Ron Bourret
>

I agree with Ron. I think we only get some simple mechanism. I think
that incorporating some other Specs like RDF will make our work
sompething else than simple.

I think we need a simple mechanism like this :

<ELEMENT NAME="FOO" >
...
<METAINFO NAME="Icon" VALUE="c:\icon\foo.bmp"/>
...
</ELEMENT>

The DTD could be something like this :

<!ELEMENT METAINFO EMPTY>
<!ATTLIST METAINFO
NAME CDATA REQUIRED
VALUE CDATA REQUIRED >

Or something like this. Notice that name are only for exmple purpose,
and are definitively not a proposal.

Other Element could be designed for providing informations about the
XSchema file (like revision, version, and so on).

Alain.