[microformats-discuss] Profiles, what are they good for, why do we need them, and how should they be implemented

Sat Jul 16 06:21:57 PDT 2005

brian suda wrote:
> Other things that XMDP cannot do that XML schema can do is custom data
> types, or even simple data types.  Right now in hCa* all dates should be
> a UTC date format. This is explained only in the english prose reference
> to the actual RFC. XMDP provides no way to enforce a YYYY-MM-DD style
> string or a $___.00 money string, or int, float, string, double, etc.
> All of which, other schema languages can. This doesn't make XMDP bad and
> worthless, they are just out of the scope.

I suddenly got an idea but unfortunately I don't know much about XML
schema and XMDP, so this idea is perhaps a a bad one.
I'll present it anyway so others with more knowledge about XMDP and XML
Schema can judge it:

Would it be possible to link a XMDP with a XML schema?

Here is an example for illustration of my idea:

For example if I would want to use hCalender on a page, I would
use the URL http://example.org/Microformats/hCalender.xhtml (or whatever).

http://example.org/Microformats/hCalender.xhtml contains the profile
and some kind of link to an XML schema:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>XMDP profile for hCalender</title>
</head>
<body>
 <dl class="profile">
    <!-- .... -->
 </dl>
 <a rel="XMLschema"
    href="http://example.org/Microformats/hCalender.xsd">XML
    Schema</a>
</body>
</html>

A (generic) validator which is used to validate my page could then read
the link(s) to the XMDP(s), fetch them and afterwards could also fetch
the XML Schema(s) and validate the specific parts of my page against
the various XML Schemas.

Is that possible and does that actually make sense?

Robert
-- 
Robert Bachmann <rbach at rbach.priv.at> (OpenPGP KeyID: 0x4A5CCF10)