I don't know whether this has been suggested before, but as an alternative 
to defining domain specific profiles of XSD, maybe the W3C can define an 
official, standard checklist of features that vendors can fill-in and 
display on their web sites.  This would give customers an equal basis for 
assessing products, and give vendors guidance on where they can improve 
their products.

There may need to be different checklists for different application domains.

I think the answers to questions need to be very Boolean, without leaving 
scope for marketing to interpret the question!  For example, just saying "Do 
you support mixed content?" is too broad and some vendors may decide they 
support mixed content by simply skipping over it (not that I know anyone 
that does that).

Going further... some process where potential customers can fill in a form 
with the features they need, and then get a list of suitable products would 
be a good way of gathering information on which features customers are 
looking for.  (In this case possibly ranked results would be better than 
omitting any vendor that doesn't completely match the customer's 
requirements, as customer requirements often involve trade-offs.)  If 
vendors could have access to this data (perhaps in summarised form) that 
could help them improve their products, thus raising the level of support in 
the industry.  The availability of the data could act as a carrot for 
vendors to put their checklists on the site.

Pete.
--
=============================================
Pete Cordell
Tech-Know-Ware Ltd
                         for XML to C++ data binding visit
                         http://www.tech-know-ware.com/lmx
                         (or http://www.xml2cpp.com)
=============================================



From rob@k... Tue Jul 19 16:01:08 2005
Received: from maggie.w3.org ([193