[relaxng-user] Re: RELAX NG book, very cheap

[Simon St.Laurent]

dvd at davidashen.net (David Tolpin) writes:
>> RelaxNG more or less for being an OS/2 in a world of Windows.
>
>It is more like Unix in the world of VMS. Small, elegant and capable.

Given O'Reilly's prior history with Unix books, I certainly hope so.

>From what I've found giving presentations and talking to people, there's
very little interest in schemas per se - partly because people who have
tried WXS found it to be a barbed-wire maze, and partly because most
people aren't actually interested in creating their own vocabularies, at
least not in any formal way.  (Even in Web Services, I've seen a fair
number of WSDL files which use xs:any for their content!)

I gave this talk on RELAX NG to Cornell librarians:

http://simonstl.com/articles/sanity2/

I had about 35 people show up.  Of those, only about seven were actually
creating vocabularies.  (In Albany, I had seven people show up, two of
whom were creating vocabularies.)

Schemas generally seems to be a small market, judging by book sales, and
RELAX NG is a small part of that market.  My expectation is that RELAX
NG will prove more useful and thrive over time, but so far the only
people I tend to see using RELAX NG are people who actually care about
XML enough to seek out information - a relatively small proportion of
the XML-using public.

I'm hoping Eric's book helps get the word out, but there's a definite
chicken-and-egg problem.  The book will help raise awareness of RELAX
NG, but only if there's enough interest to propel it through bookstores.
We'll see!

Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/
http://monasticxml.org/