SC 34 have a week of meetings in Prague. Today only WG 1 was meeting and I – for the first time – was convening it; an honour, and a slightly daunting one at that.
It was, though, very reassuring to feel that, for the first time since the OOXML days, things were returning to normal, and that the structural changes SC 34 has put in place has allowed WG 1 to return to its true purpose for XML infrastructure technologies: principally schema languages.
It was also great to see wide International participation, with experts in attendance from Canada, China, The Czech Republic, France, Japan, South Africa the United Kingdom.
We had a full agenda and the meeting day varied from some in-the-trenches technical work (prinipally on 19757-8 - DSRL) to some more strategic topics. A couple of these are worth a special mention.
XML 1.0 Fifth Edition
The first is the issue of what to do about XML 1.0 Fifth Edition. The particular revision has caused consternation in some parts of the XML community, by breaking compatibility with earlier versions of XML. XML titans such as Tim Bray, James Clark and David Carlisle have lined up to condemn the move, and Elliotte Rusty Harold has gone so far as to write that "The W3C Core Working group has broken faith with the XML community", and that,
Perhaps the time has come to say that the W3C has outlived its usefulness. Really, has there been any important W3C spec in this millennium that's worth the paper it isn't printed on? [...] I think we might all be better off if the W3C had declared victory and closed up shop in 2001.
Which, if nothing else, shows that when standards get passed which people don't like, the poor standards bodies get it in the neck — a phenomenon regular readers of this blog will have come across before.
So, the practical question is: what do we do about this in SC 34? If we have some Standards which refer to the Fifth edition, and others which refer to earlier editions, then there is a danger those standards are not interoperable, which flies in the face of JTC 1 requirements.
The initial mood around the table seemed to be that politics could be avoided by adopting an approach of "user beware". We would allow standards to mix references to the different versions and if implementations blew up on users then they'd know who to blame: the W3C.
On further reflection, however, consensus seems to be homing in on the idea that it would be better to keep all of our references pointing to XML 1.0 Fourth Edition for now, and to wait until the XML technologies around the Fifth edition matured (W3C has some work to do making XML 5Ed compatibile with other W3C technologies). Then we (and thus users) would be able to embrace 5Ed more enthusiastically; for amid the turmoil it does provide some features (such as a bigger repertoire of name characters) that are wanted by some of our non-Western users.
Schema Copyright
Another interesting issue surrounded schema copyright. When a user downloads a free ISO or IEC standard from ITTF's list, they are bound by a EULA which, inter alia, stipulates:
Under no circumstances may the electronic file you are licensing be copied, transferred, or placed on a network of any sort without the authorization of the copyright owner.
Now this raises a number of questions, but the immediate one facing WG 1 is the issue of schemas. When a standard contains a schema, it is perfectly reasonable for a user to want to extract that and use it for validation – which in most scenarios definitely will require it to be "transferred, or placed on a network".
Following an exchange with Geneva it became apparent that what we should be doing is to include a separate license with the schema, which derogates from the EULA to grant the necessary permissions. Geneva suggested a BSD-esque licence but suggested SC 34 should sensibly innovate around it:
The following permission notice and disclaimer shall be included in all copies of this XML schema ("the Schema"), and derivations of the Schema:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge in perpetuity, to any person obtaining a copy of the Schema, to use, copy, modify, merge and distribute free of charge, copies of the Schema for the purposes of developing, implementing, installing and using software based on the Schema, and to permit persons to whom the Schema is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
THE SCHEMA IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SCHEMA OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SCHEMA.
In addition, any modified copy of the Schema shall include the following
notice:
THIS SCHEMA HAS BEEN MODIFIED FROM THE SCHEMA DEFINED IN ISO xxxxx-y, AND SHOULD NOT BE INTERPRETED AS COMPLYING WITH THAT STANDARD.
Already the experts are starting to hack this around and one well-supported thought was to have it submitted to the OSI to ensure it was compatible with any conceivable FOSS scenario. If any reader has expertise in this area, I'd be very interested to hear from them...