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Infoworld quotes Don Box:
"The reality is, XML Schema is the foundation for the rest of XML," said Box. Technologies such as XML Query take XML Schema "for granted, as a given," he said. SOAP messages need to function with XML Schema, he said. "XML Schema is an inevitability. Resistance is futile. There is no point in not embracing this thing and I strongly encourage those of you who work in Web services technologies [to] make sure your story is straight" with respect to XML Schema, Box said.
Anybody who had the pleasure of hearing Don in a conference (and it is a pleasure) knows that Don Box strongly believes in strongly typed, errr, schema-validated, systems. But this, I think, is a bit too much.
The number one reason for the popularity of XML is, I think, because its creators had the foresight (a spawn of experience, no doubt) to differentiate well-formedness and validation. XML documents must be well-formed (that is, follow certain syntax rules), and may be declared as conforming to semantic rules. The differentiation allows people who want to use the technology to creat well-formed XML documents (which is very easy) without having to write down validation schemas (which is difficult, especially when you use XML Schema).
Insisting on XML Schema will do a lot of damage. For example, it will enlarge the gap between the strongly-typed camp and the scripting/documents-to-go camp. Let's stop this before it gets ugly.
Update: Don Box now provides an RSS feed of his thoughts. In describing the mechanism that drives this feed he provides the XML source and two XSLT transformations that work on that source. Guess what's missing? ...
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