Critiques of Schemas

Everything but the kitchen sink The XML Schemas process has been producing gigantic documents from the beginning. While XML 1.0 is around 30 pages, including all the Unicode information, the first draft of XML Schemas was around 100 pages and later drafts have grown over to over two hundred. XML Schemas have an incredible number of features, and very little appears to have been cut along the way.
Too much, too soon It's not clear that this much power is needed at this point in XML's development. Despite all the complaints about how slowly the XML Schema process has moved, it isn't clear that many developers are sure what to do with this enormous toolkit today.
Too hard to break into smaller units To its credit, the Schemas drafts have separated Structures from Datatypes from the beginning. Unfortunately, it's hard to break the Structures draft itself into smaller units.
A slow and opaque process The W3C process is about its members, not about the public. W3C confidentiality means that it may never be clear why certain features were chosen, on what grounds the tilt to an object-oriented approach was initially accepted, or even how exactly the Schemas group sees XML 1.0.