As I posted previously, I have issues. For the purpose of this discussion we'll limit it to my issues relate to working with Xml Schemas.

I have found more fodder for my discussion. Anything pre-version 2.0 in OFX was laid out in DTDs, not XSDs. For XSDs, .NET has the System.Xml.Schema namespace. There does not seem to be any way of parsing a DTD in .NET. So I have to convert the DTD to an XSD. I open up XMLSpy, load the DTD, and go to "DTD/Schema > Convert DTD/Schema…". Unfortunately, XMLSpy does not like the DTD, "DTD Document expected." So I go to the W3C validator, and it doesn't like it either; root elements and such.

I find out that the DTD's are not XML DTDs, but SGML DTDs. Apparently nobody supports SGML DTD's, not Visual Studio, not XMLSpy, not Stylus Studio. So I convert them to XML format, and then to XSD's using XMLSpy. But they are still not correct, at least compared to the 2.x OFX schemas.

So maybe I was a bit hasty taking the schema providers off the hook in my previous post. If the schema isn't to spec, how can anything use it? The OFX specifications were created by Intuit, Microsoft and CheckFree. You would think with Microsoft's hand in it, the schemas would be compatible with their development tools, but I am not above admitting that may just be an uninformed assumption on my part.

So the underlying question remains, who's responsible for the lack of interoperability between published schemas and the development tools?