Hi Joe,
Many thx for your comments.
Perhaps my intentions were not very well described. Personally I am not
that much stuck on plain XML schema .. it could be expressed in any
language IETF would choose to use. The point is not how to do it .. but
to do it at the moment of bringing new protocol extension.
However for years the same functionality is completely different to
configure using one vendor from other vendor (leave alone that even
within single vendor there are complete different UIs to provision the
same knob).
If anyone is even remotely serious about some form of common network OS
IMHO the first step is to create unified configuration abstraction. The
xml schema for each proto extension would be just a standard based API
for configuration input.
Keep in mind that today routers are configured by scripts from central
management clusters where there are tons of templates which in fact
completely differ from vendor to vendor and their maintenance and
keeping them up to date is a real pain.
Regards,
R.
On 8/2/12 9:25 AM, "Robert Raszuk" <robert(_at_)raszuk(_dot_)net> wrote:
Does anyone have a good reason why any new protocol definition or
enhancement does not have a build in mandatory "XML schema" section
which would allow to actually use such standards based enhancement in
vendor agnostic way ?
For docs that use XML, requiring some form of schema makes sense.
However, what we're finding at the application layer is that often times
using JSON (see RFC 4627) ends up with better interoperability more
quickly than using XML, except in the case of human-readable content like
marked-up text. See RFC 6120, Appendix A (http://goo.gl/CBv8G) for
another example.
For those that insist on XML, RelaxNG (http://goo.gl/MYnB1) is another
language you can use to describe your XML, which is a little easier to
learn than XSD.
However, for implementors, if you start with the schema and blindly use it
for conformance checking of real-world traffic, you are likely to have
both performance and extensibility issues in practice.
If folks at other layers in the stack would like input from Apps folks,
I'm sure that we would be happy to share our lessons learned. Join
apps-discuss (http://goo.gl/0Otjv) and ask for help.