James Clark has announced that the RELAX NG schema language was published by the
ISO as an International Standard on December 1st.
He writes:
I have just been informed that RELAX NG was published by ISO as an
International Standard on 1st December 2003. The full title is:
ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003
Information technology -- Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL) --
Part 2: Regular-grammar-based validation -- RELAX NG
Its ISO Catalogue entry is:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=37605
In a follow-up message, he indicates that the RELAX NG compact syntax is also slated to become
an official part of the standard, as a new normative Annex.
About RELAX NG
RELAX NG was developed under the guidance of Clark
and MURATA Makoto (creator of the original RELAX schema
language) and the members of the RELAX NG technical committee at OASIS. Work on making it
an ISO standard was subsequently taken on by the
Document Description and Processing
Languages subcommittee of the ISO/IEC Joint
Technical Committee 1 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34), as part of a larger project, the Document Schema
Definition Language (DSDL), which has as its objective
to:
create a framework within
which multiple validation tasks of different types can be
applied to an XML document in order to achieve more
complete validation results than just the application of
a single technology
Some of the features for which
RELAX NG is noted include:
- simplicity and ease of learning and
implementation
- makes no changes to the information set of an XML
document
- treats XML attributes and elements uniformly as much
as possible
- has unrestricted support for mixed content and
unordered content
- is datatype-neutral and so can partner with a
separate datatyping language (such as W3C XML schema
datatypes)
Clark has described the language in general as a
"conservative, evolutionary refinement of well-proven ideas
from SGML and XML DTDs".
RELAX NG is supported by a large number of
tools, including tools for converting RELAX NG
schemas to and from DTDs and W3C XML Schemas,
and an innovative XML editing mode for GNU Emacs that
does incremental parsing and validation of document
instances. It has also become widely used by groups
developing other standards, including some W3C
working groups.
To paraphrase another user, an appropriate slogan for RELAX NG might be:
Make your life easier: Use RELAX NG
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