XML News from Saturday, April 3, 2004

Frank McIngvale has released the Gnosis Utils 1.1.1, a public domain collection of Python modules for processing XML:

• gnosis.xml.pickle serializes objects to and from XML using an API compatible with the standard pickle module
• gnosis.xml.objectify turns arbitrary XML documents into Python objects
• gnosis.xml.validity checks validity against DTDs or schemas
• gnosis.xml.indexer provides full text indexing and searching of XML documents based on XPath
• gnosis.util.dtd2sql converts a DTD into SQL 'CREATE TABLE' statements
• gnosis.util.sql2dtd creates a DTD for the results of a given SQL query
• gnosis.util.xml2sql converts XMLinto SQL 'INSERT INTO' statements

This release adds support for RELAX NG.

I think the future is clear, and it ain't spelled "XSD". Major recent RELAX NG wins include DocBook, OpenOffice, XHTML, and SVG; all of which are planning to move to RELAX NG in their next versions. I have yet to encounter a group that seriously explored RELAX NG and still chose to use the W3C XML Schema Language. Which reminds me. Henry S. Thompson has released a new version of XSV, his "open source (GPLed) work-in-progress attempt at a conformant schema-aware processor." This is a bug fix release. Honestly, if the very bright Professor Thompson, one of the editors of the W3C XML Schema specification, still can't get this right three years after the spec was released, what hope is there for the rest of us?