Re: [relax-ng] Future of RELAX NG

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ "MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)" <eb2m-mrt@asahi-net.or.jp> was heard to say:
| To avoid the two procedural problems mentioned above, I think that the
| best way to go forward is:
|
| (1) SC34 the authoritative committee for the RNG specification,
|
| (2) members of the OASIS RNG TC paricipate in discussions 
|     by e-mail or F2F, 
|
| (3) the OASIS RNG TC continues to make the OASIS committee specification
|     identical to 19757-2, 
|
| (4) the OASIS RNG TC maintains what has not been standardized by SC34.  
|     That is, RELAX NG Tutorial, Guidelines for using W3C XML 
|     Schema Datatypes with RELAX NG, and RELAX NG Compact Syntax
|     (which is only partially standardized by SC34.)
|
| (5) the OASIS RNG TC can do promotion and education.
|
| How do people feel?  Some people feel that ISO/IEC is not important in
| the US, but I would argue that the ODF .vs. OOXML issue reminds me of 
| ISO/IEC.

I think moving the standards work from OASIS to ISO effectively makes
the RELAX NG standards work invisible to most people in the US. I
think that's risky, but I don't have a better answer.

As DocBook has moved to RELAX NG for its normative schema, there's a
natural desire on the part of DocBook TC members to encourage vendors,
especially XML editor vendors, to support RELAX NG.

One person reported that he's heard "The RELAX NG committee at OASIS
hasn't done anything in years, that's a dead language" from more than
one vendor.

I think there's value in letting RELAX NG be "stable" but I think it's
also important for the technology to be seen to be evolving. That's a
natural tension and I think we've probably played "stability" as far
as we can. I think it's time to start discussing, if not actually
implementing, a RELAX NG 1.1.

I, for one, would like to revisit the ID/IDREF pattern constraints and
I'd like RELAX NG to support xml:id. I think we should also consider
what to do about XML Schema Datatypes V1.1.

I suppose it's ok if that work is done in SC34, provided that we are
able to communicate that fact to the outside world in a useful manner.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
XML Standards Architect
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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