Re: [relax-ng] RELAX NG 2.0 ideas

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

> If you have for instance a nice customed library for a datatype which is
> supported by a very limited number of Relax NG processors, you might want
> to use it when possible and to use the closest W3C XML Schema type when
> the datatype is not supported by the validator.

There are some things one can do to alleviate this potential problem 
without changing RELAX NG itself:

- Develop standard datatype library APIs; for Java and .NET, we have 
already done this

- Schema authors can parameterize their stylesheets; it's not hard to set 
things up so that each reference to a custom datatype is in a separate 
define and to provide a schema that overrides the custom datatypes with 
their closest XSD equivalents

- Validator implementors could provide a "datatype substitution" 
capability; e.g. a separate XML document that maps unsupported datatypes to 
their closest equivalent

James