Simon St Laurent summarizes the most contentious issue facing XML digerati: "Rising Rebellion Against W3C XML Schema". Many developers are looking for alternative schema languages because they are afraid of massive complexity of Schema standard. Currently there is no clear winner.

Schema is already well-established and making far-reaching impacts on other standards eg SOAP, XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0 and XML Query 1.0. Because XML Query is trying to be statically typed query language, it needs Schema; because Query is to embed XPath, XPath 1.0 is to accomodate Schema and become 2.0; because XSLT uses XPath, it too becomes 2.0. As XPath and XSLT get "upgraded" they will be incompatible with the original 1.0. Even though some part of the upgrade may benifit users, much of the changes are happening for the sake of XML Query 1.0.

Unfortunately XML Query 1.0 when it's delivered some time in the future will not have CRUD capabilities. (It cannot update nor delete.) Once native XML database vendors disappear, who will use this language?

Maybe this year (2002) we will get an answer to the question of schema language after two years of debate and also see MathML, SVG, SMIL and others finally become usable and useful after many years of promises. There are still six months left.