Re: Escalation mechanism for different interpretation of W3C XML-Schema specification ?

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Michael Kay writes:

> Note that dcterms-elem.xsd is reachable from vac.xsd via one route that
> contain a "redefines" step, and by another route that omits this step (but
> which does contain a different redefines step). This is where the
> interpretation of "pervasiveness" is critical: Saxon takes the view that all
> references to components that have been redefined are references to the
> post-redefinition component. In fact the rule introduced in Saxon 9.2 (whose
> incorrect implementation caused the bug) is that every component has a
> redefinition level, so if A redefines B and B redefines C then a given
> component may have redefinition levels of 2, 1, and 0; all references to a
> component name are taken as references to the highest available redefinition
> level, and if there are two different components at the highest redefinition
> level, it's an error (for example, A redefines C, and B also redefines C).
> There's nothing at all in the spec to justify these rules, but it's the only
> way I could find of handling complex redefinition lattices that seemed to
> make sense.

I agree that this is the best available interpretation.

> But the chameleon includes interfere with this (perhaps deliberately).
> Because the common components have been copied into three different
> namespaces, a redefine occurring in one namespace does not affect copies of
> the component in a different namespace. That's Saxon's interpretation,
> anyway.

I agree again.

> In experimenting further with this schema, I discovered that if the two
> imports from vac.xsd are reversed in order, the import of
> owms-classes-redef.xsd has no effect, because it is then importing a
> namespace that is already known to the processor; Saxon ignores the
> schemaLocation URI in this case. So the schema document
> owms-classes-redef.xsd, and the redefinitions that it contains, are simply
> ignored. This makes the situation very fragile: reversing the order of
> imports does not make the processing fail, it just silently compiles a
> different schema. I think this reinforces Henry's argument that if you're
> going to redefine, then there should be one redefining document for each
> namespace, which acts as a gateway to that namespace, and no other
> includes/imports/redefines from elsewhere in the schema should bypass this
> gateway. This schema breaks this rule, and gets away with it only because of
> gateway document is encountered before the bypassing document.

Right -- a useful analysis, thanks.

ht
- -- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
                         Half-time member of W3C Team
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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