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RE: The use of XML syntax in XML Query

• To: "'Jonathan Robie'" <jonathan.robie@s...>,"'Elliotte Rusty Harold'" <elharo@m...>,"'Henry S. Thompson'" <ht@c...>,"'David Carlisle'" <davidc@n...>
• Subject: RE: The use of XML syntax in XML Query
• From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>
• Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 17:58:03 -0000
• Cc: <www-xml-query-comments@w...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <5.1.0.14.0.20020103115426.034b90d0@s...>
• Reply-to: <michael.h.kay@n...>

> >>>2. The XPath solution: Make all XQueries look nothing like XML
> >>>documents; i.e. no tags, no elements, no attributes
> >>
> >>Computed element constructor syntax allows this. Here is
> Henry's example
> >>done in computed element constructor syntax, where the
> wrapping element
> >>is in the XML document, and nothing in the query per se
> looks like XML:
> >
> >I haven't seen this before. It does look like a possible solution.
> >However, you still need to eliminate the non-computed
> element constructor
> >syntax, which will still cause all the problems of user
> confusion on its
> >own, even if a non-confusing alternative exists.
>
> I'm not convinced that we need to remove the angle-bracket
> notation for
> element constructors. In queries that are not embedded in an
> XML document,
> I don't think that they cause users to be confused.


Is there a possibility of a solution in which the XML-like syntax becomes
pure XML, and is regarded as a preprocessor syntax, so that a query written
as a well-formed XML document (using element constructors for elements,
processing instructions for PIs, and comments for comments) can then be
translated mechanically into an XQuery expressed as a Unicode string, which
itself uses no XML-like constructs?

This would mean the Unicode-XQuery syntax wouldn't need to include all the
XML-like constructs, greatly simplifying parsing, while the XML-XQuery
syntax would be pure XML and therefore manipulable using all XML tools. The
translation from XML-XQuery to Unicode-XQuery could almost certainly be
specified and indeed implemented in XSLT.

I think this would also satisfy the real user requirement behind XQueryX.

OK, there's timescales. But the reason we put drafts out for comment is to
get comments!

Mike Kay

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    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@s...>

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