You know we're in trouble when we need an
XML Acronym Demystifier. Things are really getting out of hand.
Tim Bray is extolling RelaxNG after his experiences writing a schema for Pie/Echo/Atom/Whatever. I agree that RelaxNG is technically superior to XML Schema. I've all but given up on RelaxNG supplanting XML Schema as the majority schema language for XML. I suppose that's mostly because I'm looking at it through the lens of Xerces and the disinterest we've had from RelaxNG knowledgeable folks in the past.
Something needs to happen for RelaxNG to pick up momentum. Right now, it's just another one of those acronyms that we need the demystifier for. Until the RelaxNG community starts showing up to projects and helping to build RelaxNG support, RelaxNG will remain obscure. A few years ago I tried to use the leverage that we had with Xerces-J to try and advance RelaxNG, but no one was interested enough to help us. If the RelaxNG folks don't care enough to get RelaxNG support into the most popular processors in all the major languages, then they can't expect the rest of us to care.
I partially disagree with
Aaron Swartz and Mark Pilgrim (and probably a host of others) on Postel's law. All the examples that Aaron gives are related to documents that users might process (this includes RSS feeds, where I've been bitten by his reason #1). I agree that in those situations, it's desirable for the parser to be Postel compliant (i.e. lenient). But in situations where the XML is generated for machines, by machines, I think that the XML spec writers were correct. Let them eat fatalErrors, because there's a bug in a program somewhere that needs to get fixed.
One of the motivations for the Xerces Native Interface was to allow us to build families of parsers by replacing pieces of the framework. So you could implement a strict XML parser (which is what XMLDocumentScannerImpl is) or you could implement a Postel XML parser. Only problem is that nobody cares enough to implement a Postel XML parser.
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