At seyboldreports.com, Liora Alschuler reports on the RELAX presentation Murata Makoto gave at XTech.

The article tells a rather dramatic tale of the XTech presentation, describing Murata as 'lone samurai', presenting the day after the XML Schemas Town Hall meeting had gone rather quietly. Although RELAX document descriptions are referred to as grammars, rather than schemas, the potential conflict is quite clear. (RELAX does use part 2 of the XML Schemas work for datatypes, however.)

Despite some concerns over fragmenting the market, the article's conclusion is quite optimistic:

On first glance, RELAX looks like a winner on several counts: simplicity, ease of implementation, backward and forward compatibility, modularization, and added analytic power for structured document development and manipulation. These technical advantages, coupled with its freedom from parochial commercial interests and slow-moving consensus politics, make it a very interesting development for anyone involved in spreading XML from its document roots into the larger area of structured data.

Other coverage:

• XML.com also has RELAX coverage from XTech 2000.
• RELAX Schemas coming soon