By: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » RELAX wins

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 23:29:35 +0000

[...] He’s referring to Tim Bray who writes: Choose RELAX Now · Elliotte Rusty Harold’s RELAX Wins may be a milestone in the life of XML. Everybody who actually touches the technology has known the truth for years, and it’s time to stop sweeping it under the rug. W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. They are hard to read, hard to write, hard to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML. Schemas based on Relax NG, also known as ISO Standard 19757, are easy to write, easy to read, are backed by a rigorous formalism for interoperability, and can describe immensely more different XML constructs. To Elliotte’s list of important XML applications that are RELAX-based, I’d add the Atom Syndication Format and, pretty soon now, the Atom Publishing Protocol. It’s a pity; when XSD came out people thought that since it came from the W3C, same as XML, it must be the way to go, and it got baked into a bunch of other technology before anyone really had a chance to think it over. So now lots of people say “Well, yeah, it sucks, but we’re stuck with it.” Wrong! The time has come to declare it a worthy but failed experiment, tear down the shaky towers with XSD in their foundation, and start using RELAX for all significant XML work. [Update: Piling-on are Don Park, Gabe Wachob, Mike Hostetler and some commenters. There’s thoughtful input from Dare Obasanjo, and now the comments have some push-back too.] [4 comments] Actually Eliotte’s post was short and unemotional - other than the title. Here’s most of it: Among the XML cognoscenti, the debate is effectively over. Everyone is choosing RELAX NG as their schema language, and compiling to DTDs or W3C XML Schemas as necessary. I don’t know of a single project in the last couple of years that considered both RELAX NG and W3C Schemas and chose to go with the latter. Certainly, there’ve been a lot of W3C Schema adoptions. However those seem to have been made mostly by people who didn’t know they had a choice. In particular, the W3C imprimatur seems very appealing to larger, more bureaucratic organizations such as government agencies. (So it’s the title, and Elliotte’s standing, that have convinced the world) Some of the XML-DEVers are less than convinced - their argument is that paying customers in large companies don’t care how awful the technology is as long as it’s seen to be standard. W3C XSD will survive and prosper simply because it’s there, tooled up, and supported by the 800lb gorillas. I give myself a little pat on the back for having taken this anti-XSD stance ( SOAP of the evening, beau…tiful SOAP) a few days ago. Given the choice I would never have developed CML in XSD. Why did I do it? Because it was then (and perhaps still is) the mainstream way to do XML, where we can expect tools from professional developers. Like Xerces - yes, I’m still going to blog Xerces some time… It’s difficult enought to persuade chemists to be interested in anything in this area, and by using minority approaches more would be turned off - and I’ve had people who would not have looked at CML unless it was XSD-based. However things have changed. Every part of the XML/Web world that I interact with is boiling with change. We have finally admitted that there is a better way. Perhaps it will even reach the gorillas - after all they adopted SAX - and you can’t get much simpler than that. [...]

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By: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » RELAX wins