Discussion of RELAX-NG/W3C Schema normativeness in SBSC work

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

In today's SBSC teleconference we discussed making changes to the XPath 
information instance document model so that we could have two normative 
expressions of its schema: RELAX-NG and W3C Schema.

At the present time, the RELAX-NG expression is normative and the W3C 
Schema is informative, because I have co-occurrence constraints in the 
RELAX-NG expression that are not supported in the W3C Schema expression.

We decided to try and change the document model such that the co-occurrence 
constraint can be removed and the two expressions would express identical 
constraints on a document, so that users of the XPath files could use 
either RELAX-NG or W3C Schema.

I'm discovering that while such a schema could be divined, it is impacting 
on the ease of use of the vocabulary we've created.  There are many more 
changes to my production scripts in order to accommodate these than I had 
anticipated, but they are doable.  I'm worried about the integrity of the 
changes when we are trying to rush something out for review, and how others 
might find it awkward to work with the constraints expressible when having 
to use W3C Schema.

So, before we put these out for review, can I get some feedback please from 
the TC regarding the use of RELAX-NG expressions as normative expressions 
of document model constraints?

Would there be any comments not supporting having only a RELAX-NG 
expression of the normative constraints on the document model?  In other 
words, would anyone object to our work if we did not have a normative W3C 
Schema expression of the document model constraints?

Thanks for your opinion ... I'm anxious to hear if anyone would object.

. . . . . . Ken

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