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Simon Willison’s Weblog

RELAX NG now an ISO standard

Via James Robertson, RELAX NG (altogether too many caps) has been published by ISO as an International Standard. RELAX NG compact syntax is will hopefully join it soon.

RELAX NG is the sane alternative to XML Schema. It’s a schema language which allows you to define the “shape” of a class of XML documents—a bit like a DTD but far more flexible. The reason I like it is the compact syntax, which lets you define schemas using a non-XML syntax similar in some ways to CSS. This makes defining new types of XML document far less unpleasant.

Posted 16th December 2003 at 3:41 am

This is RELAX NG now an ISO standard by Simon Willison, posted on 16th December 2003.

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3 comments

  1. I've been waiting for Relax NG to become an ISO standard. It's far more powerful than DTD, but is not especially much more complicated. Of course the XML syntax is a bit less easy to write, but compact is upcoming... (Why write XML when it complicates things instead of simplifies them? Except for that you can use one and the same parsing engine for the validator document and the validatee document, which you can't for the compact syntax.) At the same time even the XML syntax is far easier than XML Schema without losing especially much of it's power, so it's a clear win in both areas. That it has no document specified association mechanism with XML documents is it's only major downside, that I can think of.

    liorean - 16th December 2003 16:27 - #

  2. The thing I love about compact syntax is that it maps directly to the XML syntax, so you can author stuff in the far, far more friendly compact syntax and then run it through a converter to create a semantically equivalent XML format schema.

    Simon Willison - 16th December 2003 16:35 - #

  3. The best thing about RelaxNG is the fact that James Clark wrote nxml-mode which makes editing XML with RelaxNG schemas a total dream!

    Dominic Mitchell - 17th December 2003 08:24 - #

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