schema questions

[Chris Williamson <ch...@wolfram.com>]

I have heard rumblings of new schema functionality.  What exactly is this
new functionality?  Where can I go to read about it?  I am looking to
validate a SOAPEnvelope I build up.  Is this something I can do with this
new functionality?  Is this something I can do anyway.  I got stuck trying
to do this because I could not figure out how to read the schema from within
the WSDL.  I know Xerces validates schema, but how do you validate against
schema located in a WSDL?  Is this new functionality going to replace the
symbol table functionality currently available?  What features will this
provide beyond the symbol table?  Is there going to be a better api?
SchemaUtils provides some useful methods, but seems to be incomplete.   When
a type is defined, I want to be able to access its extension if it does
extend something.  Is the symbol table the best way to access type
information defined in the schema?

Any information about the present and future of schema (especially
validation and meta-data) would be very useful.

Thanks,

Chris