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Re: Getting specs/standards right (was UPA and schema handling

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Getting specs/standards right (was UPA and schema handling)
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:38:14 -0400
• In-reply-to: <20041018144435.BYLN20770.mta10-svc.ntlworld.com@Turtle>
• References: <20041018144435.BYLN20770.mta10-svc.ntlworld.com@Turtle>
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Michael Kay wrote:


> XQuery is not a big language. It is arguably smaller than XSLT 1.0. 

The argument for that proposition would be more than a little 
jesuitical. The only way you could claim that would be by ignoring the 
complexity of XPath 2.0 vs. XPath 1.0, and since XPath 2.0 is a 
necessary part of XQuery and XPath 1.0 is a necessary part of XSLT 1.0, 
I don;t think that's fair. A conformant implementation of XQuery 1.0 
would be immensely bigger than a conformant implementation of XSLT 1.0.

At one point I would have said XQuery 1.0/XSLT 2.0 was conceptually 
simpler than XSLT 1.0 based mostly on the differences between sequences 
and node-sets/result tree fragments. Unfortunately, the working group 
started making exceptions to the clear and practical sequence logic in 
the name of performance, and therefore thoroughly muddied what had been 
a exemplar of clarity to the point where I can no longer be sure whether 
any function will work with any particular data type without reference 
to the spec. Thus the conceptual framework no longer seems simpler and 
clearer to me. :-(

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

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  • RE: Getting specs/standards right (was UPA and schema handling)
    • From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>

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