The road has been long and hard, and it's had a number of difficult sections along the way. Rick Jelliffe, in a recent posting to XML-DEV, noted that the latest drafts have been greatly revised based on feedback, and he suggested the areas in which they are likely to see most significant use. Jelliffe, author of Schematron , also painted a picture of the future of XML schema efforts in which a number of alternative approaches would peacefully co-exist . It is quite likely that there will be an XML Schemas 1.1. I am hopeful.
Open systems thrive by allowing organic plurality.
Following the promotion of W3C XML Schema, the W3C has also published the first official draft of a formal definition for XML Schema . Jonathan Robie announced its publication to XML-DEV , along with a description of its goals. This formalization is a formal, declarative system for describing and naming XML Schema information, specifying XML instance type information, and validating instances against schemas. Specify names for all components of an XML Schema, so that they can be uniquely identified by URIs. Such unique identifiers may be useful to XML Query, RDF, and topic maps, among others.