Charles Muller wrote:
> As a person who up to this point not yet touched schemas, I am wondering
> to what extent the move to schemas is an overall trend within TEI

well, the TEI council did agree that the internal schema language
for the TEI Guidelines will be RelaxNG in P5. So that does bias
things somewhat. that may be a trend?

> even XML document handling as a whole, that I should begin to be
> concerned about. Is it the case that a large percentage of TEI people
> are now building their projects from schemas rather than DTDs?

I doubt it. Early days still.

Docbook is going to supported of schema, on a about the same timescale
as the TEI, fwiw.

> Should I
> be thinking about upgrading my present working systems from DTD-based to
> schema-based?

its a not a big deal to do so, really.

> I know that we have had some brief discussions on this recently, but I'd
> be interested in hearing something broader

schemas are good if you

  * need multiple namespace working
  * want to use some of the editing tools which dont grok DTDs well
  * want strong datatyping
  * want the other kids on the block to give you respect

otherwise, if it aint broke...

I'd say the chief relevance of schemas is in the creation of texts,
not in their daily use

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Sebastian Rahtz      Information Manager
Oxford University Computing Services
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