Hi Ian, My 2 cents.
Namespaces: You have probably already had lots of discussion on namespaces. There can be problems with forwards and backwards compatibility of schemas if you make the namespace the same as a resolvable URL. Things like "bug compatibility, processing repeatability, existing JSDL documents, existing JSDL-aware services all come into play. My 2 cents would be that date-based versioning is a good idea, and that you should not get some kind of philosophical hang-up about versioning and namespaces (e.g. "But the *plan* says that version 2.0 will come out in 6 months time!"). Transparent schema changes which keep the same namespace are typically OK so long as:
I'm not sure what you mean by "namespace the same as a resolvable URL". The namespace "http://www.ggf.org/namespaces/2005/03/jsdl-o.9.4.xsd" is just an URI, it has no meaning apart from a string that satisfies the required URI syntax. Whether or not that "http://..." string resolves to a network resource or not is not implied and often a cause for confusion. By the way, there is a typo in the schema (version 0.9.4 on gridforge), the namespace attribute reads <xsd:schema ... xmlns="http://www.ggf.org/namespaces/2005/03/jsdl-o.9.4.xsd" ....> spot "..jsdl-o.9.4.xsd", I think it should read "..jsdl-0.9.4.xsd". (Did you see that?)
Numerical Operators: It is not at all clear to me what the following sentence or the example XML are supposed to indicate:
"Numerical operators can be used through the general XML extensibility mechanism. For example:"
I agree the "Numerical Operators" section is a bit out-of-place, maybe this can be action for the call to see whether we need to explicitly say in the spec. something that is NOT going to be included in this version.
Normative XML Schema Types: It is not clear to me what you mean by this section. For example, what is xsd:any##other? or "Complex"? Is that to say those are the only types you allow? Surely not, but then what does 4.2.1 mean? I don't think 4.2.1 adds anything to the specification. I'm guessing you just mean "The following built-in XSDL types are used in JSDL ...", but so what? And "any##other" is not a type, nor is "Complex".
Shall we just say in the spec any type that is defined with the http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema xsd namespace has the semantic defined in the "XSD Schema Part 2: Data Type" recommendation.
Final comment: it would be nice to have a single tabular summary of all the "elements" in JSDL along with:
cardinality (*,+,?, etc.) description parent element data type (string, numeric, enumeration, etc.)
I'll let Andreas or the list to decide on that. Here is one I've prepared (from the schema on gridforge - version 0.9.4 - 15th March 2005) using the Oxygen tool, which you might find useful. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~wwhl/download/jsdl.html William --- William Lee @ London e-Science Centre, Imperial College London -- --- Software Coordinator --- A: Room 380, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, Huxley Building, South Kensington campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK E: wwhl@doc.ic.ac.uk | william@imageunion.com W: www.lesc.ic.ac.uk | www.imageunion.com P: +44(0)20 7594 8251 F: +44(0)20 7581 8024 --- Projects ---------------------------- GridSAM: http://www.lesc.ic.ac.uk/gridsam Markets: http://www.lesc.ic.ac.uk/markets ICENI: http://www.lesc.ic.ac.uk/iceni -----------------------------------------