[jsdl-wg] Summary of Document-Oriented Schema Changes

[Donal K. Fellows]

Here's a summary of what I think the changes to the JSDL schema should
be, based on my understanding of what Igor proposed:

Firstly, a little house-keeping:
   'id' attributes should probably change name to 'profileGroup'; in the
   XML community, 'id' means something very specific (unique within a
   document) and our 'id' attribs are definitely not that.

Now, to the substance. Firstly, an explanation. None of this is
necessary for the primary goal of JSDL (providing a description of
simple jobs); it only really becomes necessary when you embed JSDL
within a wider context of, say, a large workflow. But this is a case
that we will certainly want to support going forward.

The gist of Igor's proposal is that we make JSDL somewhat more
document-oriented, in a way similar to an XML Schema or a WSDL doc. To
do this:
   Want to be able to declare things that can be referenced from
   elsewhere, together with having infrastructure that can do this
   referencing.
     -> Need a name attribute on many elements (I suspect this is not
        needed on Profile, but instead on Resource, etc.) of type NCname
     -> Need a ref attribute on all elements with a name attribute
     -> Allow named elements as direct children of topmost element (I
        forget the name; Job<SomethingOrOther>). These declarations have
        no meaning in themselves; they just exist to be referred to.
     -> New element to import declarations from some other document into
        a namespace, rather like <wsdl:import> (toplevel only).
     -> Non-toplevel elements may have ref attributes and no other
        content; name (a qualified name, not an NCname) must point to
        some element in the current document (or imported) with a
        suitable name element.
     -> Topmost element to have a targetNamespace attribute
   (I think that's it?)

I'll write tomorrow on the the Application subtyping scheme. That's
distinct from this proposal.

Donal.