[XCON] Discussion Point 4: XML Schema Structure

[Adam Roach <adam at nostrum.com>]

[as chair]

The XML schema used to describe a conference object contains common 
conference information (the portion that doesn't vary depending on the 
type of conference) in addition to a conference template section. There 
are three ways this can be represented:

  1. The top-level information is the template section, and it contains
     a subsection that is the common conference information. This has
     the advantage that the schema can all be well defined: because the
     common conference information is known at the time the template is
     developed, the appropriate schema definition can be inserted into
     the template schema. The downside is that this setup requires
     navagation of the template information to get to the common
     information, which is likely to be manipulated more frequently.
  2. The top-level information is the common conference information,
     which contains the template information. This has the advantage
     that clients don't even need to care about the template being used
     to allow rendering and control over basic conference functionality
     (which will suffice for many clients, especially those with
     limited screen real estate). The downside is that the common
     conference information schema must include an arbitrary exension
     point to allow new templates to hook into the schema. This make
     schema validation very difficult.
  3. The template information and common conference information are
     conveyed as two separate objects (e.g. using multipart mime). This
     provides the benefits of allowing completely separate schema,
     straightforward schema validation, and easy access to the common
     conference information. The downside is that any mechanism for
     separating the schema is going to add some amount of protocol
     complexity (although it can be argued that it is increasingly
     difficult to find a potential client of the XCON protocols that
     doesn't already support multipart mime).

Which approach should we take?

/a

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