RE: [office] Clarification re: DSDL and W3C Schema

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

I mostly disagree with John and Sean.

I am not a RELAX-NG expert, but from what I know and have
heard, RELAX-NG should be able to describe everything we 
would want to say.

And it should be feasible (there are those with such
experience) to make clean, reasonable, automated 
conversions from RELAX-NG into the closest possible
analogues in XSD and DTDs.

I very much think we want (1) machine readable and
processable definitions of our language and (2) automatic 
conversions from our working language to the others.

I support the decision I thought we already took to use
RELAX-NG as the language with which we will define our
application and to plan to provide automatic translations
to close-as-possible XSDs and DTDs.

paul

At 21:10 2003 01 08 +0000, Sean McGrath wrote:
>I agree with John. There is a lot to be said for making the normative
>expression of the constraints independent of schema-language du-jour.
>Some BNF-ish notation along with narrative text is one possibilty.
>This will of course be imperfect, true expression of the specification
>can only be seen through running code. However, I think this bears
>consideration as putting one particular schema language "on top"
>to generate the others mechanically risks:
>
>1) creating an impression that one particular schema language is superior
>to the others (lets not start that debate!)
>
>2) mechanically generated schemas will always be yucky compared
>to hand crafted ones - creating second class citizens of the generated
>notations.
>
>regards,
>Sean McGrath
>http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com
>
>
>At 21:04 08/01/2003 +0000, John Chelsom wrote:
>>One reflection on the DTD/Relax/W3C Schema debate:
>>
>>We seem to be assuming that we will need to perform an automated (and
>>probably imperfect) transformation from a normative syntax into others that
>>people may want to use in their own implementations. We could, of course,
>>use any notation we like for the normative expression of the specification,
>>so long as it unambiguously defines the XML structures in the open office
>>format. We could then publish implementations as DTD/Relax/W3C Schema,etc
>>with comments where necessary on how each syntax does (or does not) support
>>what we have defined.
>>
>>As far as I can see there is no necessity to define an automated
>>transformation from our specification to any given format. Our problem is
>>(almost) the same one that has been faced by activities such as UBL and HL7
>>(for those of you interested in a far bigger manifestation of the problem in
>>the healthcare domain). The problem is that XML schema languages (I think
>>all of them, but I someone may want to correct me) are not rich enough to
>>specify the logical information models required in those specifications.
>>
>>The only thing that we definitely need to do is make sure our specification
>>is complete and unambiguous in itself. We can then add examples of
>>syntax-specific implementations to help people implement their own
>>applications, but these aren't normative and (almost certainly) won't be
>>generated 100% automtically from the specification itself.
>>
>>Regards,
>>John
>>
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>