Hi
Martin
Having discovered that I can’t
post to the CAM list [bad attendance record I
guess J] I thought I’d run a few thoughts
by you.
Overall CAM looks nice although I imagine it
won’t fly well with existing schema fanatics J [not
complex enough].
I like the way that CAM
provides ‘deterministic flexibility’ sidestepping the XML-Schema issue that a
flexible schema makes everything optional.
However assuming that users will start from existing
XML there appear to be some omissions?
1)
There is no
predicate support for namespaces. [Yes I know you don’t like them but if
you need to meet existing XML documents half way then you’re going to need
this?]
2)
In XML-Schema
xs:all allows a ‘group’ of elements to appear in any order rather then in the
order listed. While I doubt there’s much demand for this in business documents
it would be very hard to reproduce in CAM without explicit support? So may
be worth adding?
makeRecursive
Requires a StructureID which is only available as an
Advanced Option? But the predicate itself is not itself an Advanced
option?
“Donates that the specified
parent element can occur recursively as a child of this
parent.”
Does this mean that a block of XML could appear
anywhere in the tree under the
parent?
This would seem excessively liberal and would prevent
any hope of building an XML-Schema from a CAM
template as David Webber would like to do?
Surely you need to have some ‘link’ from the point the
recursion is ‘inserted’ to the structure that is to be
‘recursed’?
Or have a missed
something?????????
Packaging – trivial observation but the current vogue
[at least in web services J] is to try and
make large specs appear smaller by chopping them up!
In the case of CAM this might fly quite nicely as
CAM Base would equate to your
stuff and CAM Patterns and
CAM Repositories to
Davids?
How’s the selling process going with UBL? Where
does it sit with respect to ebXML [which it obviously sits quite well with]?
And are you looking anywhere else? ISO have for instance DSDL which is a
schema collective wrapped round XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron etc. etc. –
might offer some scope for feedback if nothing
else?
Cheers Chris
Hipson
Web Service Technology
Consultant
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the
facts." Albert Einstein
Tel. 01977
593109