Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Authoring Schemas With XSD

Posted by timothy on from the dare-unravels-with-his-usual-aplomb dept.

Dare Obasanjo points to his own "article on O'Reilly's XML.com that specifies a set of guidlelines for authoring schemas using the W3C XML Schema Definition language commonly abbreviated as XSD. The primary theme is embracing simplicity by showing how to avoid the more complex and esoteric features of the language."

5 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Article Motivation by Carnage4Life · · Score: 5, Informative

    When the W3C XML Schema recommendation was first released, there were certain parties whom overwhelmed by its newness, complexity and buggy implementations began to advocate using as few features as possible which culminated in the article W3C XML Schema Made Simple by Kohsuke Kawaguchi. However, a year later with parser implementations getting up to speed and more people using the technology it is clear that a number of the earlier misgivings about using some parts of the technology were misguided.

    This is very similar to the situation with Mozilla and C++. In 1998, a few months after the ISO standard was ratified a set of guidelines for using C++ were specified by the Mozilla team which included rules like don't use templates, don't use exceptions, and don't use namespaces. Since then the Mozilla team has looked back at their decision and realized that some of the decisions they made were unwise specifically listed as mistakes were avoiding exceptions and templates. I truly commend the Mozilla team for making their post mortem available online for other [C++ or otherwise based] software development projects to learn from.

    This article aims to do the same thing for the XML community and the W3C XML Schema recommendation.

  2. Re:but where is it used ? by Kragg · · Score: 5, Informative

    XML is good for industry standards bodies. It's open, there are open implementations, and you can irrefutably lay down the syntactic and semantic law in a schema without any ambiguity.

    FpML, ArApXML, MDML are good examples of industry-specific XML standards. Going into the wider space, you get ebXML, SOAP and more.

    XML is the new-world replacement for EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and it's biggest uses are B2B and company-internal, with a small B2C following starting up for things like weather data, news feeds etc. It's not surprising you've not come across it... and until you go and work for a megalithic corporation on the IT side, you probably won't.

    --
    If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
  3. Re:Someone give a copy to Microsoft... by daeley · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think they already have a copy. The author, Dare Obasanjo, works for them.

    --
    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  4. Example website using XML by kelzer · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not sure how much traffic they get these days, but the InfoWorld website is XML based. I believe it uses server-side XSLT transforms to turn XML into HTML.

    Also, don't assume that just because the URLs don't have ".xml" in them that the site isn't using XML - it's often transparent, such as when using Apache Cocoon

    --

    ---------------------------------------------
    SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  5. Re:but where is it used ? by syd02 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Take a look at www.gentoo.org The whole site uses XML.

    Also check out Daniel's articles for IBM developerWorks describing the site... Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4