Re: the simple case and the regrep tech spec

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

[posted for Jon Bosak]

Subject: Re: the simple case and the regrep tech spec

(Folks, please note the cross-posting for this discussion.)

I'm still trying to understand Terry's message of 11 March under
this subject heading.  I have some questions for him.

The normative case for what the xml.org implementors are calling a
"system download" is one in which a document (a purchase order,
say) used in a machine-mediated transaction references a schema,
and an application attempting to process the document wants to get
that schema without human intervention in order to validate the
document against that schema.  This is the bare minimum of
functionality as I understand it.

Assuming that the application knows how to handle whatever form of
schema it finds when it retrieves the thing, there is a question
of what to do when the schema is actually a composite of several
modules, as in the case of DocBook.

>From an initial reading of Terry's message, I get the impression
that the submitter in this case has to submit the composite schema
needed for automatic validation as a registered item in its own
right, even if the separate modules that make it up are also
registered items.  Is this correct?

If this is not correct, I'm going to guess in advance that there
is in theory a way to reconstruct the composite schema from a
"specification of relationships among related data."  If this is
the case, can there be more than one "specification of
relationships among related data," and can there be a standard way
of pointing to which "specification of relationships among related
data" allows an application in the minimum case correctly to
assemble the composite schema?

Jon