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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RE: XQuery and DTD/Schema?
 At 10:14 PM 7/7/2002 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote: >At 03:43 PM 7/6/2002 -0400, Thomas B. Passin wrote: >>I'd like to suggest a different take on why there may have been such a hue >>and cry about XQuery/Xpath2/XML Schema. I think it has a lot of explanatory >>power. See what you all think. >> >>Up until recently, most experienced XML practitioners probably felt that >>they could write any part of the XML processing chain themselves if they had >>to or wanted to. Anyone could write a parser (I'm not necessarily talking >>fact here, but perception), and most people probably though they could write >>an XPath processor if put to it. XSLT would be harder, but still one or a >>small group could picture themselves doing it. We have Saxon from Mike Kay, >>for example, and 4xslt from Uche's gang. >> >>Going along with this, if you needed, say, XPath for Ruby or Curl, you could >>imagine writing it if no one else got around to doing it. In this lies a >>great sense of freedom. You could do it yourself, and especially you could >>do it without needing the products of big companies. As soon as you need a programming language, this starts to fall down. I wouldn't want to write my own Java and JVM, or my own C++ compiler. I could imagine doing it myself, given infinite time, but my imagination sometimes runs wild. >>Now comes XML Schema. This does not look like a one-person project (Yes, I >>know, XSV - I said it was about perception). This is a big deal, if you >>could even understand the Rec well enough. And to most people it probably >>does not seem like an interesting job, either. To mix XML Schema into XPath >>for XPath2 also seems like a great burden. XQuery seems too much to tackle, >>too. SOAP toolkits - they are coming out of much bigger efforts. I agree that XQuery is beyond the ability of most programmers to implement by themselves. One estimate I heard recently was that it takes 6 *very* good people about 6 months. But how long would it take most people to write compilers or interpreters for other programming languages or query languages? I don't think that a query processor is as simple to write as an XML parser. That doesn't mean that queries are bad. >>If this is close to the mark, the resentment and fear comes from a perceived >>withdrawal of the previous freedom. Any unclear or complex feature of, say, >>XML Schema, will tend to trigger the reaction. So no amount of explanation >>about any one issue can settle anything, which seems to be what we are >>seeing here. The threads just keep circling around and repeating the same >>points. > >That's a reasonable explanation of the fear and loathing that the W3C XML >Schema specification and its relatives generate in those of us without the >resources to deal with it as easily as we have dealt with XML 1.0. Yes, I agree that this is a good explanation for the fear. Yet, I don't think this fear is well placed. Programming languages and query languages are very helpful, even if they are not easily implemented by the average developer. Jonathan 
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