Document versioning and XML Schema

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

On 2014 Jun 23, at 10:21, Markus Demleitner <msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:

> My impression is that most clients already try some sort of "best
> effort"-parsing (extracting what they think they understand,
> discarding what they don't, and freely interpolating otherwise).  

For what it's worth, I think this is a better (that is, more realistic, and more robust) approach than compulsively validating against an XSchema.

This is the general approach of Schematron[1], which is duck-typing for XML, without the heuristic vagueness which the term 'duck-typing' usually suggests.

> I think we'd have a much better VO if they didn't have to work
> *against* our standards and practices to do this -- and adopting a
> model where the semantics of this best effort are rigorously defined
> would also let us evolve certain aspects of our standards much more
> smoothly.

It is my firm belief that the IVOA's early adoption of XSchema contributed to a fixation on syntax, at the expense, sometimes, of the shared semantics that is surely the real goal of the IVOA.

All the best,

Norman


[1] See <http://www.schematron.com/>, with a compact overview at <http://www.schematron.com/overview.html>.

-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK