As I get ready to go to the OSDL DAM (desktop architects meeting) in Portland I am suddenly reminded why standards for standards sake can be harmful. This is the case of RelaxNG vs. W3C XML Schemas. I remember looking at W3C XML Schemas wanting to write a Schema to XML parser code generator back when I was in school. I never got around to building it because Schemas just was huge and unintuitive. What I did get out of my exploratory phase was someone pointing me to the OASIS ’s RelaxNG work which was way simpler but not created at the W3C.

Now Tim Bray has thrown his hat in the ring and said RelaxNG is the clear winner. This is an example of why there needs to be an evolution of standards from real world use. The competition between the two standards was good in many respects. It allowed different approaches to the same or similar problems to be evaluated. The shame in all this is they have both become standards before the competition could organically pick a clear winner. By many accounts XML Schemas is a bad standard because of its complexity but, because it is a standard there will always be an argument of why it should be supported. It is a bad argument but there you have it.

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