home | O'Reilly's CD bookshelfs | FreeBSD | Linux | Cisco | Cisco Exam  


Book HomeXML SchemaSearch this book

13.2. The Need for Open Schemas

In this chapter, we have discussed the features that may make the components defined in a schema reusable and flexible. This is definitely something to look for, but the impact of this effort is limited to the conception and maintenance of schemas and has little or no impact on the documents themselves. Even though application designers often see XML instance documents as tightly coupled to their schema and to the application for which they were first created, the life span of documents often exceeds the life span of their applications and schemas. XML documents or fragments are also often reused in other contexts, or serve as a container in which other information is added to create combinations that their original author never imagined.

Opening XML vocabularies to facilitate and control such evolution is quite challenging and goes beyond designing open schemas. It requires a different perspective on what an XML document is and has an impact on the way to code the applications (which should, for instance, be as tolerant as possible of unexpected elements and attributes). Grammar-based schemas, such as W3C XML Schema, have a basic problem with open vocabulary: everything that has not been explicitly allowed is forbidden, and the schemas are effectively "closed by default."

If we define the openness of a schema as the ability to modify the content model explicitly defined by the original schema without defining a new schema (we already covered the modification of the content model through a modification of the schema in the earlier section Section 13.1, "Extensible Schemas"), the tools that we have at hand are the substitution of type through xsi:type and the wildcards.



Library Navigation Links

Copyright © 2002 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.