XML Schema Train Wreck



I thought I would post this as an XML general interest item.

 

From: Harry Pierson 
Posted At: 
Thursday, August 19, 2004 11:26 PM
Posted To: 
aggregated
Conversation: More MSFT Architect Bloggers + a Standard 
Rant
Subject: More MSFT Architect Bloggers + a Standard 
Rant

http://blogs.msdn.com/devhawk/archive/2004/08/20/217585.aspx  
|  Comments

We keep getting more and more field architects and architecture strategy team 
members blogging. Remember, I keep a list (I am becoming the 
Scoble of Microsoft Architecture). Anna Liu is a field architect evangelist 
who presented at TechEd 
Australia (but we didn't get a chance to hang out). Anna's also been 
thinking about software development 
as an engineering discipline.

In addition to Anna, two of my teammates are blogging: Chris Keyser and Dave Welsh. Chris is a solution 
architect who's doing some awesome next gen SOA work. He's been blogging 
about 
using WSE2 to manage Security Context Tokens. Chris, like John 
deVadoss (who has relapsed into silence), is very pragmatic so it's great to 
run radical ideas past him.

Earlier this year, our team "inherited" a group of awesome vertical 
architects - I've blogged about John Evdemon before who's from that 
group. Dave is also from that group. Like 
many of our vertical architects, Dave is heavily involved in standards bodies - 
in Dave's case it's UN/CEFACT. He's got an great 
article on how Standards Development Organizations traditionally work and another 
on how MSFT (and our specification partners) is improving on that process. He's 
shining a light on the dark corners of the standard process, which is a good 
thing since so many people act like standards are a silver bullet solution. I 
love Dave's description of the traditional standards process:

  
[L]aunch a committee, politically pick a chair, generate lots of hype and 
  expectation on how this spec will solve world hunger, stack the new committee 
  with people who may be able to contribute, host conference calls and arm 
  wrestle the original idea down to some compromise that seems to make sense, 
  then hope someone’s got a number of free weekends over to write up a draft of 
  the new spec.

You want an example of the results of a traditional standards process? How 
about XSD? I think XSD is the ugliest widely-used spec around.  Don agrees, according to his comments 
from last years SellsCon:

  
Nothing illustrates [the cost of standardization] more than XML schema. XML 
  schema is the quintessential example of what happens with a design by 
  standards body specification. Rather than taking something that worked and 
  something that was done and that there was experience with and effectively 
  dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s you had two from every company off doing 
  wanton innovation and invention without implementation experience. It was a 
  train wreck in the making, especially when you consider the fact that you had 
  people who vehemently disagreed about what they were building. Some people 
  thought they were bringing object orientation to XML. Some people thought they 
  were bringing database schema concepts to XML. Some people thought they were 
  just, you know, reliving the SGML dream. So what do we get? We get a 
  Frankenstein’s monster that is dumber than the dumbest person in the 
  committee. No one person on that committee could have produced something this 
  bad. It took an army of people to work hard day and night to build something 
  that is not good. It’s not terrible – can we make it work? Yes. But it’s going 
  to take a lot of work from a lot of plumbers and a lot of tool vendors to make 
  XML schema palatable to the average developer. 

  
A great example of the opposite approach is RELAX NG. It is widely believed 
  at this point in time that RELAX NG is a better schema language for XML than 
  XML schema. Why? Because two guys who were really smart said why don’t we go 
  do this and let’s get it working and let’s build it while we do it and let’s 
  iterate it and see what works and what doesn’t work. And then when we’re done 
  we will take it to the rubber stamp – I’m sorry, Oasis – where they will 
  carefully vet every decision and bless it and give it UN status. 

I'm with Don and Tim: 
I want RelaxNG. More importantly, I want 
standards that are built like WS-* and RelaxNG.
 

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