Re: [Alsamodular-devel] xml schema

[Lukas D. <AFB...@gm...>]

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>Have you also considered James Clark's Relaxng as alternative?
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>http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/
>http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/
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Hmm...tasty ;-)
Seems simple enough, yet powerfull.
Seems there is everything in it we would propably need.
Still i'm a bit puzzled.

Is this a replacement for W3C Schema?
is it a complement,
or subset?
What about acceptance?
Would it be save to rely on it as a standard?
Is there any c++ api available (under an acceptable licens)?
If not, would it be difficult to code a validator? (ontop of sax?)
Do we (the ams people) acualy like it? (I do!)

lotsa questions. Any answers available?

BTW, in case anyone is wondering what we could use this for:

I thought about having each module definded by an XML Schema (like a 
dtd, but much more powerfull) + an dsp algorithm wrapped within a c++ class.
This would solve two problems in one turn:

A.) it would define the xml language for the patch files. And it would 
do this job completly. No implicit semantics. And this again would make 
editing patches in a text editor more fun. (this was one of the original 
requirements for the file format)
Since Schemas can be easily combined/merged/derived etc. we would have a 
very powerfull conig system.

B.) it would make it easy to have nice generic gui for all kind of 
modules, even ladspa or whatever, for the (propably common) case that 
their are no special classes defined for this purpose. All that would be 
needed would be a schema describing the modules features. It would 
however still be neccessary to put up some default definition if there 
is no schema for a particular ladspa plugin available. have to think 
about that.

C.) ...did i say two reasons? I meant three of course ;-)= ... it would 
be fun to contribute modules. You put up your dsp code. wrap it in a 
provided default class, write the spec (as xml schema) and that's it.

There might be different pros. i havent thought much about (ui) 
customization, but i think this shouldn't be a big problem either.
There are definitly some cons, too. As noted above, i haven't yet found 
a free validating schema aware parser. Writing our own might be some 
work. OTOH, that is propably work to be done in some way or another, 
sooner or later, no matter what we use to describe the patch / modules.

Comments, please?

Lukas