Hi Folks,

Today’s discussion really had me wondering about the size of the thing that we are creating. We are probably looking at a complete spec that is over 200 pages. I feel reasonably strongly that this is too unwieldy. I don’t think that we have the editorial resource to effectively bug-check the document and aside from IBM it is difficult to imagine that there are many groups with the resource to implement it.

At the end of today’s call we started discussing features of XML Schema that we might drop from the first release and my attitude to the discussion was one of resistance. Do we really need to drop attributes? Doesn’t the choices document we have pretty much handle wildcards.

We are agreed that the property set should be defined with optional libraries around a small, but extensible core. I suggested today that we take the same approach to the whole language.

What if were to focus on defining for our initial release a DFDL Lite and look for a minimal set of properties and XML Schema mechanisms that would be useful. Make it as simple and implementable as possible with a minimal of XML Schema and a minimal set of properties. And define it in such a way that we can add the rest of the material as modular supplements (ideally without having to go back and change the existing semantics).

There was reasonable support for this approach from those that remained on the call today. I wanted to float it to the group…thoughts anyone?

Thanks,

Martin