Re: [xsl] Request help in understanding: node instance of schema-element(node)

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:06 PM 1/28/2008, Tony Coates wrote:
> > In my experience, schemas (of whatever variety) have been used for two
> > purposes, which have historically been joined at the hip, but which are
> > actually quite distinct.
> >
> > One is "validation", which is to say, determine whether a document or
> > parts of a document conform to an expected or required type. ("Schema as
> > gauge.")
> >
> > The other is for type annotation or even for binding of XML data (which
> > natively takes the form of sequences of characters) to data types.
> > ("Schema as jig.")
>
> I would also add to that "Schema as template", where a Schema is used to
> provide guidance to an author (especially when using a Schema-aware
> editor).  For example, you may not care about document order for
> validation or binding, but you might impose an order for authoring, just
> because human editors often work better with a "template" where each data
> item is in a known location relative to other data items.

That's a good point, Tony. I'd have thought that would be another 
case of "schema as jig", but you're right, it's very different from 
the type-annotation example. Indeed, as has been pointed out in the 
past (and to bring this back to XSLT), type annotation could be 
considered a sort of transformation, whose spec just happened to be 
given in a schema. And transformations that rely on it might well be 
accomplished in pipelines rather than in scenarios relying on 
"validation" (which then relates us to another ongoing thread).

But "templates" are for people, which is something else entirely.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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