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On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 11:21:11AM +0100, Dylan Walsh wrote: > > > At the bottom of this email is an excerpt. As you can see, the > equivalent XML is very, very long-winded. It is using an element syntax > for the XPath expressions, and it also heavily expands the XQuery parts > aswell. When I heard about the XML Syntax, I thought that was an > excellent developement, as an alternative to the existing text syntax, > with its pseuodo elements etc. However this XML Syntax below is such > that it is unlikely to be used for hand written querys. I don't think the XQueryX syntax was intended to be particularly human-writable, or even human-readable. To quote from the lastest XQuery doc.: "The Query Working Group has identified a requirement for both a human-readable query syntax and an XML-based query syntax. XQuery is designed to meet the first of these requirements. For an alternative, XML-based syntax for the XQuery semantics, see [XQueryX 1.0] " You can find similar language in the introduction to XQueryX. I think the primary purpose was to have an easy-to-parse format, that reflects the structure of the query. It's like an intermediate language in a compiler, between the programming language and the assembly language, that's easier for tools to work on. For what it's worth, with my DB background, i don't feel "alien" at all with the textual format of XQuery (and Quilt, XML-QL etc.), while I find XSLT rather hard to read and write. Maybe it's because I don't have any specialized tools for that, and just use regular text editors? To my XSLT-untrained eyes, it seems that I have to read/write much more code that I would write in SQL/XQuery (primarily because of the endless closing tags you see at the end of every XSLT program!) Maybe it all comes down to design goal #10 of XML: 10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance. Oh well! Best regards, Vassilis.
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