Re: my first xml schema - I think it's good. Is it really?

David Carlisle wrote:
yes true, as far as it goes, of course it does leave me (as editor of the mathml dtd with its ~2000 entity definitions with no viable schema technology replacement) with something of a problem:-)

Yeah, I know. Entities are the one thing DTDs did that schemas decided not to. The current recommendations are either to use just enough of a DTD to provide those and to use schema for the rest (ugh), or to use some other macro facility or to define tags for the purpose (which doesn't address languages that started out in the DTD world). Sigh.

XML was rushed into use before it was stable. The *right* way to do it would have been to fully define the infoset, with types and namespaces, and then to derive the schema language and syntax and so on from that... but we didn't have that luxury; in order for XML to win acceptance as quickly as it did, it had to be rolled out in stages, syntax first. That's left us with a few warts. Someday there may be an XML 2.0 which goes back and cleans everything up -- probably about the time XML is ready to graduate from Recommendation to Standard -- but that isn't likely to happen very soon.

XML is still a good thing; it could be better but we're already using it productively and nobody really wants to delay that while we wait.

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