Re: [dita] DITA XML Schema backwards compatibility and conformance

[Eric Sirois <esirois@ca.ibm.com>]

I think that it would be inappropriate for the normative
schemas to be 
more restrictive than the DTDs since that could indeed break documents.
Unless the current Toolkit is already validating those values (I'm 
pretty sure it's not) it would definitely come as a surprise to many 
users to have documents fail that did not fail before.

If you were to provide <copyryear
year="2001, 2007"> , the schemas would return an error at
the moment.  So it seems the consensus is to remove the gYear as the
type in lieu of a string type. 

I think it would be appropriate to highlight the issue
in the 1.2 spec 
and provide both an option in the Toolkit to validate the values and 
provide a variant version of the schemas (or some sort of switch) to 
turn on the validation, for the benefit of those users who do want to 
prepare for a time when these data types in particular will be validated.

 In DITA 1.2. I could provide two
additional complexTypes for  @year, @created, etc.  If someone
wanted to use those instead of the basic string datatype. If users wanted
to the more restrictive datatypes they could specify the more specific
<copyryear> using the xsi:type attribute.

For example:  <copyright  year="1999,
2007" xsi:type="copyryear.iso8601.class/>  where this
particular complexType use xs:gYear for the @year.

Kind regards,
Eric

---

Eric A. Sirois
Staff Software Developer 
DB2 Universal Database - Information Development
DITA Migration and Tools Development
IBM Canada Ltd. - Toronto Software Lab
Email: esirois@ca.ibm.com
Phone:(905) 413-2841
Blue
Pages (Internal)

"Transparency and accessibility requirements dictate that public information
and government 
transactions avoid depending on technologies that imply or impose a specific
product or 
platform on businesses or citizens" - EU on XML-based office document
formats.

Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>

03/31/2008 04:25 PM

To	dita@lists.oasis-open.org
cc
Subject	Re: [dita] DITA XML Schema backwards compatibility and conformance

Eric Sirois wrote:

> Does it make sense to have a conformance statement for ISO 8601?  Should
> XSDs help enforce the conformance statement in  this case, knowing
that 
> once DTDs validated documents would possibly be invalidated once the
are 
> validated against XDSs?  

I think that it would be inappropriate for the normative schemas to be
more restrictive than the DTDs since that could indeed break documents.
Unless the current Toolkit is already validating those values (I'm 
pretty sure it's not) it would definitely come as a surprise to many 
users to have documents fail that did not fail before.

One thing I will point out is that in some scenarios documents may go 
from being DTD-validated to being schema validated with no direct user
involvement (for example, a CMS might export originally-DTD-based docs
as schema-based docs or use schemas for internal validation). That means
that a user who authored a DTD-validated document could have that same
document fail somewhere else simply because it was rebound to a schema.

I think it would be appropriate to highlight the issue in the 1.2 spec
and provide both an option in the Toolkit to validate the values and 
provide a variant version of the schemas (or some sort of switch) to 
turn on the validation, for the benefit of those users who do want to 
prepare for a time when these data types in particular will be validated.

I think that for interoperability it is appropriate to define a specific
data type for dates, in particular, but I think we've already lost the
opportunity to be as strict as we might like.

Cheers,

Eliot

-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 610.631.6770
www.reallysi.com
www.rsuitecms.com

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