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RE: XQuery -- Reinventing the Wheel?

• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• To: Kimbro Staken <kstaken@d...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 19:35:04 -0700 (MST)

> Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> >
> >
> > Not a problem as far as XSLT qua XSLT.  But once you rely on this property
> > for standardized  treatment of a grove (term loosely used), which is what
> > it seems your XSLT-base dproposal would do, I think you'd need to have
> > strict prescription of the mapping  from multiple documents to XSLT source
> > for this not to be problematic.  Maybe you already do so in your paper,
> > which would, I think, cover my concerns.
>
> I'd think this to be a minor point really.

Course it is.

> I believe Evan's major point
> is just that the majority of XQuery syntax can be easily mapped to XSL-T
> and that creating an entirely new syntax may not be the proper thing to
> do.

That's how I understood it at first as well.  What, I think threw things
off a bit for me was the following exchange:

Bob Kline:

"I have been given to understand that XQuery supports searches across a
collection of XML documents and XPath does not.  Are you saying that
this understanding is incorrect?"

Evan Lenz:

"This is correct, but XSLT already extends the XPath model to support
non-well-formed source trees. Thus, the XQuery "ordered forest" is very
much like the XSLT data model."

Now I'm guessing at what Bob meant, but as I read that question, the
simple answer is document() and not some minor arcana of the XSLT spec.

My talk of thin ice was precisely making the point that I hoped such
minutiae were not the basis of the argument against XQuery's re-inventing
the wheel.  As I think you, Evan and I all agree, the main point is that
XSLT provides the general machinery for document query across documents.

All I think would be needed in XQuery is a formalization of document
collections and some unification of data models across the various facets
of XML (XPath, DOM, SAX, XLink [note linkbases]), etc., where query proves
useful.  And finally a few primitives based on XSLT extensions for
specialized and efficient query calculus.

XQuery could be a very small and very familiar spec.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@f...               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python

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