Rick Jelliffe wrote:
 >>Most interesting were the recommendations for future committee work,
 >>which can be summed as: For God's sake, don't add anything;
 >>concentrate on errata and conformance tests.
 >
 > That may be the groupthink at the end of the meeting, but it is not
 > what you see in many of pre-meeting submissions, unless you have
 > a very liberal definition of errata. Many people want reforms to
 > wildcards and UPA, in particular. When the participants go home
 > again, they will still need their changes, or be unable to cope
 > with mixed content, or runtime typing, or whatever, and wonder
 > "Did that workshop actually set my requirement back a step?"

There will never be a "don't extend it" consensus on any subject. It's 
human nature to believe that any specification, law or even commandment 
can be fixed with just a slight adjustment. The fact that the feedback 
sessions weren't _all_ about promoting the speaker's favorite hobby 
horse is remarkable.

 > Large user groups will have to show leadership with profiles.
 > And vendors will have to adopt a layered mentality defined outside
 > the XML Schemas Working Group: MicroSoft's submissions for example
 > manage to say that they don't want to support XML Schemas 1.1 but
 > that Office would like co-constraints (and, indeed, that there is
 > already have a kind of XPath based co-constraint system in infoPath).
 > So why treat co-constraints as something that the schema grammar needs
 > to support? Why not do it a layered way, with annotations containing,
 > in particular, Schematron assertions?  The pain of XML Schemas is
 > its monolithicity: the solution is not expansion or conformance suites
 > but proper layering.

Yes. I wonder why the modeling-language plus Schematron approach hasn't 
gained more traction? Is it that the attempt to understand XML Schema 
burns out so many brain cells none are left over to grapple with 
Schematron? Is it lack of support by existing validating parsers? By 
tools? Is it because a second validation pass is perceived to be too 
expensive? Is it that ISO has no clout in the internet community? You 
have more experience with these issues than anyone; maybe you know the 
answer.

 > I have a little blog "Snow Season in Schemaland" at
 >   http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7372

Very entertaining. ;-}

Bob Foster
http://xmlbuddy.com/

 > Cheers
 > Rick Jelliffe