On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 4:20 PM, Michał Górny <mgo...@gentoo.org> wrote: > First of all, I don't like RELAX-NG Compact at all. It looks like > someone tried hard to combine some variation of BNF, DOCTYPE > and something else in order to get something that is both readable > and compact. And got a result that doesn't meet either criteria. > It looks like some terrible mixture of over-verbose descriptive text > format with a lot of enigmatic symbols that are not even clear what > they apply to.
Wow, that's surprising to me! I found that a lot of the compact syntax made immediate sense to me as I was already familiar with what ?*+ mean from EBNF and regular expressions. For me, it's mostly how much less verbose it is than a full XML syntax that makes it easier to comprehend and manipulate. > Secondly, RELAX-NG and XML Schema look pretty similar in volume. > However, XML Schema looks definitely more readable, robust and XML-ish > (and doesn't use camelcase!). Furthermore, as far as I'm aware XML > Schema is more widely supported (not sure if that applies to any tools > we're considering). I agree that XML Schema is probably more widely supported, though it'd be hard to assess by how much. On other hand, I find XML Schema much less readable; and it feels like "more XML-ish" is just because it uses namespaces a lot more, and is more commonly used? Indeed, to me the fact that RELAX NG is less XML-ish is a positive aspect. > Therefore, I'd suggest we just ship properly hand-written XML Schema, > with some nice comments. I don't see a reason to ship any RELAX-NG > files unless we actually have tools that support only that. I'd be curious what Michael, Ulrich, and others think. Cheers, Dirkjan
