Yesterday the World Wide Web Consortium published new drafts of its XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1, as ‘last-call’ drafts.

The idiom has an obscure history, but is clearly related to the last call for orders in pubs which must close by a certain hour. The working group responsible for a specification labels it ‘last call’, as in ‘last call for comments’, to indicate that the working group believes the spec is finished and ready to move forward. If other working groups or external readers have been waiting to review the document, thinking “there’s no point reviewing it now because they are still changing things”, the last call is a signal that the responsible working group has stopped changing things, so if you want to review it, it’s now or never.

The effect, of course, can be to evoke a lot of comments that require significant rework of the spec, so that in fact it would be foolish for a working group to believe they are essentially done when they reach last call. (Not that it matters what the WG thinks: a working group that believes last call is the end of the real work will soon be taught better.)

In the case of XSD 1.1, this is the second last call publication both for the Datatypes spec and for the Structures spec (published previously as last-call working drafts in February 2006 and in August 2007, respectively). Each elicited scores of comments: by my count there are 126 Bugzilla issues on Datatypes opened since 17 February 2006, and 96 issues opened against Structures since 31 August 2007. We have closed all of the substantive comments, most by fixing the problem and a few (sigh) by discovering either that we could not reach consensus on what to do about the problem (or in some cases could not reach consensus about whether there was really a problem before us) or that we could not make the requested change without more delay than seemed warrantable. There are still a number of ‘editorial’ issues open, which are expected not to affect the conformance requirements for the spec or to change the results of anyone’s review of the spec, and which we therefore hope to be able to close after going to last call.

XSD 1.1 is, I think, somewhat improved over XSD 1.0 in a number of ways, ranging from the very small but symbolically very significant to much larger changes. On the small but significant side: the spec has a name now (XSD) that is distinct from the generic noun phrase used to describe the subject matter of the spec (XML schemas), which should make it easier for people to talk about XML schema languages other than XSD without confusing some listeners. On the larger side:

• XSD 1.1 supports XPath 2.0 assertions on complex and simple types. The subset of XPath 2.0 defined for assertions in earlier drafts of XSD 1.1 has been dropped; processors are expected to support all of XPath 2.0 for assertions. (There is, however, a subset defined for conditional type assignment, although here too schema authors are allowed to use, and processors are allowed to support, full XPath.)
• ‘Negative’ wildcards are allowed, that is wildcards which match all names except some specified set. The excluded names can be listed explicitly, or can be “all the elements defined in the schema” or “all the elements present in the content model”.
• The xs:redefine element has been deprecated, and a new xs:override element has been defined which has clearer semantics and is easier to use.

Some changes vis-a-vis 1.0 were already visible in earlier drafts of 1.1:

• The rules requiring deterministic content models have been relaxed to allow wildcards to compete with elements (although the determinism rule has not been eliminated completely, as some would prefer).
• XSD 1.1 supports both XML 1.0 and XML 1.1.
• A conditional inclusion mechanism is defined for schema documents, which allows schema authors to write schema documents that will work with multiple versions of XSD. (This conditional inclusion mechanism is not part of XSD 1.0, and cannot be added to it by an erratum, but there is no reason a conforming XSD 1.0 processor cannot support it, and I encourage makers of 1.0 processors to add support for it.)
• Schema authors can specify various kinds of ‘open content’ for content models; this can make it easier to produce new versions of a vocabulary with the property that any document valid against the new vocabulary will also be valid against the old.
• The Datatypes spec includes a precisionDecimal datatype intended to support the IEEE 754R floating-point decimal specification recently approved by IEEE.
• Processors are allowed to support primitive datatypes, and datatype facets, additional to those defined in the specification.
• We have revised many, many passages in the spec to try to make them clearer. It has not been easy to rewrite for clarity while retaining the kind of close correspondence to 1.0 that allows the working group and implementors to be confident that the rewrite has not inadvertently changed the conformance criteria. Some readers will doubtless wish that the working group had done more in this regard. But I venture to hope that many readers will be glad for the improvements in wording. The spec is still complex and some parts of it still make for hard going, but I think the changes are trending in the right direction.

If you have any interest in XSD, or in XML schema languages in general, I hope you will take the time to read and comment on XSD 1.1. The comment period runs through 12 September 2008. The specs may be found on the W3C Technical Reports index page.