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...this article would largely benefit from being expanded into a more thorough analysis. On the one hand I do mean this as a compliment, but on the other I can't help noting that a lot of the interesting data has little or no useful analysis.
On the more editorial side, listing "problems in the middle" is useful, but just saying "Declaring default values for data in the XML instance. I've blogged about default values before." for one of the items is not. There may or may not be interesting content on the other side of that link, but without at least a one sentence description of what it may be I don't think many people are going to bother. Likewise, I don't want to know that the author thinks that "the analysis searched for "xsd:attributeGroup" resulting in matches for both declarations and reuse or "@ref"", I would be much more interested in reading the article after that bug in the analysis method as been fixed, since it doesn't feel exactly difficult.
More importantly I think there lacks an analysis of the type of schemata that were investigated, a characterisation of the test set. For instance the lack of mixed content and the poor showing of list and union just scream out that the data set is heavily data oriented as these features tend to be very hard to avoid for anything document related (for mixed content, even something that is largely data but captures humans readable text at any point either very likely requires mixed content, or is not designed with I18N in mind and will need to add it, perhaps if only for ruby annotations).
Finally, it has surfaced in studies last year that most XML Schema schemata were invalid. Were all of those in this test set validated? Is there a relationship between the features they use and their validity (perhaps, again, one of simplicity)? I think that would be interesting to know.
I guess I'm ranting because I haven't seen an interesting article on xml.com in a long while, all in all I think this one raises the bar :)
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