today, the W3C released new versions (both parts 1 and 2) of XML Schema. the last time a new draft was released (back in september), i hailed the decision to finally give the language an official acronym, XSDL. i was wondering why they did not settle for one of the two obvious candidates (XSD and WXS), but anything is better as a name for an XML schema language than XML Schema
. apparently, the decision to invent a new acronym was not received well, so they reverted back to XSD, which now is the official acronym (at least until the next drafts). i am happy as long as i don't have to refer to XML Schema
anymore...
anyway, the changes made since version 1.0 still remain very substantial, begging the question why this is just a minor version of the language. and i still question the wisdom of making the language even bigger; it was suffering from a bad case of feature bloat already. the changes in part 2 (datatypes) seem to be less substantial, mostly big fixes and small updates.
since the W3C has been very busy hardcoding XSD into so many other specifications, a certain degree of success for the updated version of the language is more or less guaranteed. however, most of the technologies based on XSD have to be updated to accommodate a new version of the language, that could also be an opportunity to walk away and choose a more lightweight language (or set of languages).
the W3C also published new versions of the RDFa syntax (which advanced to candidate recommendation status) and the RDFa primer. the subtitle of the primer changed from Embedding Structured Data in Web Pages
to Bridging the Human and Data Webs
, apparently somebody like the latter better. i have not looked at the RDFa drafts at all, but i think it is really good to have something that provides an RDF syntax that is simpler to deal with than RDF/XML.
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