2009/9/29 XMLSchema at XML4Pharma <XMLSchema@x...>:
> We, the CDISC XML-Tech Governance Team (and other CDISC teams) have
> developed a number of extensible standards for exchange of clinical data and
> for submitting information to the regulatory authorities (FDA).
>
> CDISC is a Standardization Organization active in the healthcare world.
>
> Our extension mechanism is based on the “import” and “redefine” elements of
> XML-Schema.
>
> We now have a serious dispute with one technology vendor (Altova) about the
> way “import” and “redefine” are used. Instance files of one of our
> extensions (so-called “define.xml”) validate well in all major validators
> and XML-editors, except for the products of this one vendor.
>
> When confronted with this result, the reaction of Altova essentially is that
> “Altova is right, all others are wrong”. The dispute and discussion with
> Altova can be followed at:
> http://www.altova.com/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1000005665
>
> The issue were not so serious if it were not that our standard “define.xml”
> is a standard for submission of information to the regulatory authorities,
> and these are (mostly) using the Altova product for validation.

This was talked about before:

http://markmail.org/message/ccxa6gbyvn3773kx

The advice you were given back then was "xs:redefine is pretty messy,
and the best advice is to avoid it" so it seems a little odd to now
take the stance you have... especially when you say most of your
customers use Altova.

I can understand your frustrations, but I'm not too sure what your
want to achieve here - even if Altova agree you're right and a make a
fix for their next release, it will still take a long time for that
version to filter down to your existing customers, if at all.  By the
way, what does "escalating it to the W3C" mean?

This reminds me of a project where the app worked fine on everything
except IE 5.5 on windows NT, and that was what the majority of the
users were on.... it would have been nice to escalate the issue to
make the problem go away :) but sadly we had to code around it.

Not very helpful I know, sorry, perhaps you could move straight to XSD 1.1?


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/