RE: COMPLEXITY BIG ISSUE

[David RR Webber <Gnosis_@compuserve.com>]

Dependancy is a strong word!  That was not my intended inference here,
however I see what you mean.

This could become a Catch 22, and we need to avoid that.   I believe
we have sufficient of a handle on this to pass over to the W3C folks a
core set of functionals that the Schema must both provide and also
measure up to.  I.e. versioning support, and similar (technical features)
and then human metrics - easy to read and understand, minimize use
of required attributes, maximize use of intelligent defaulting, ensure
good design practices and interoperablity are reinforced (abstract
tangibles).

Therefore these two efforts should run in parallel and harmonized
over the next few months.   Most especially however we need to ensure
that the W3C is not delivering an Edsel from our perspective - notice if
the requirements are not where they should be - it will for sure not do the
job!
This is rule #1 of engineering, and right now everyone is assuming that 
the requirements will be met - but as we saw yesterday - the requirements
are NOT there for ebXML key needs.

Without hitting the business need - instead we will have a Schema system
that just compounds problems and de-rails the process.

DW.
=================================================================
Message text written by David Burdett
> 
David says ...
>>>I'm very happy with 4 to 6 months [for W3C schema], seeing this meshes
well with the ebXML timetable<<<

I think that we can completely separate any dependency between the schema
recommendation and our work if:
1. We specify the data requirements and structure of any message headers,
envelopes etc, in a way that is "syntax neutral", ie. we define a
hierachical structure of field names and descriptions where all the field
names are expressed in natural english or short phrases.
2. We map the hierachical structure to relevent XML definition languages
specifically a DTD and a W3C Schema if it's available and judged
sufficiently stable.

Thoughts?

David
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