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> -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Kay [mailto:michael.h.kay@n...] > Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 6:11 AM > To: 'Champion, Mike'; xml-dev@l... > Subject: RE: W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts - > Still missing Updates > > But I also worry about the cost we are asking users to pay > (learning costs, transition costs, cost of complexity) to achieve these > benefits. It's a fine judgement to get the balance right. Right. FWIW, I can make a more compelling argument for adding simple types (so that people can query on floats or dates without insisting that the string representations match), than I can for adding full schema support (e.g., so that a query processor can infer that valid instances of a schema could not possibly match a query). That seems to incorporate the lessons of SQL (as near as I can tell from this thread and from some Googling) -- people use the simple types in simple ways, but getting into type theory and user-defined types quickly leads to Interoperability Hell. The larger issues that Mike Kay raises are critical: All this committee work is for nothing if the result is too complex or expensive to actually use. I am not all that much dumber than the average software developer, I have followed the XML world full-time for 5 years now, and this schema/PSVI/strongly-typed XQuery stuff makes my head spin. I can't imagine what ordinary developers who don't focus on XML will think of it. Actually, come to think of it, I can ... it will be C++ and the Windows API all over again; few developers go anywhere near it without GUI tools and wizards to hide the complexity behind a proprietary front end. Sigh, I thought that was what we were trying to put behind us....
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