According to Tim Bray (and others), it is no contest - RELAX NG wins.
The last two canonical models I was involved in used XSD. I have a hate hate relationship, with XSD, but I'm not yet convinced that RELAX NG is the path forward for me right now. I need to get my learn on. The biggest issue, really, is that there is a lot of XSD out there - a lot of schemas that I may want to fork into my canonical format are already in XSD.
In my experience, the basic 25% of XSD is ok - it is the other 75% that has a lot of very dark corners. That and the never ending evil of code generation from schema. Here are some other benefits of RNG over XSD according to Wikipedia.
I also have to figure out where Schematron fits (or doesn't fit).
What tools are people using with RELAX NG and Schematron that they are happy with? I see Topologi. Last time I was involved in this we used XML Spy. It is a pitty that it does not seem to support RNG?
What about runtime support - what works well for Java, .NET, Ruby, and z/OS (the last one should be fun).
Any experience in the trenches?
