I have decided to use XML Schema to define the various documents that will be used in MM27. Ever since my first REAL experience with XML on the DCS team, I have always grudgingly used DTDs to define document structure, because at the time, Schema was still in much flux. Although Schemas becamea W3C Recommendation in May, I hadn’t thought to look back at them until this new development cycle began. Reading briefs on the standard, the two ways of defining documents are obviously similar, but the major advantage of Schema is that it is itself an XML implementation, which just seems to make more sense to me.

We don’t have any need to ever validate documents, so these Schemas are solely for our own documentation purposes. I can’t vouch, nor have I really looked into whether or not the support is there in parsers and validators..