Rope, Anyone?

Back in a previous lifetime when I worked as a consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation, we all loved using the VMS operating system. However, we also joked that it was so capable and flexible that it gave us a thousand different ways to hang ourselves. The W3C XML Schema language is very similar. You can write a nearly infinite number of schemas to describe any particular instance document. Every one of these schemas can provide an accurate description of the document, be loaded into a parser, and validate the document.

XML Schemas and the Formal Study of Grammars

The situation of multiple schemas being able to validate the same instance document is very analogous to a situation in the formal study of languages and automata ...

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