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XSD vs. RELAX NG

Stefan Tilkov,

Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:

I think the future is clear, and it ain’t spelled “XSD”. Major recent RELAX NG wins include DocBook, OpenOffice, XHTML, and SVG; all of which are planning to move to RELAX NG in their next versions. I have yet to encounter a group that seriously explored RELAX NG and still chose to use the W3C XML Schema Language

I have only taken a casual look at RELAX NG, but I clearly like it a lot better than XSD. Now if it would only be acknowledged in the Web services world …

On April 5, 2004 9:44 PM, Neil Earnshaw said:

Looking at the examples in the RELAX NG Tutorial, http://www.relaxng.org/tutorial-20011203.html, it seems to have one really big disadvantage: it’s impossible to read.

I can take in the DTDs with a glance, but I really have to work hard to understand the equivalent RELAX NG.

On April 5, 2004 10:38 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Neil, take a look at the compact syntax:

http://www.relaxng.org/compact-tutorial-20030326.html

Much easier to read that either DTDs or XSDs, IMO. Another good example is Tim Bray’s Pie schema (back when Atom was called Pie) - http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/09/PieSchema01 .