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On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 4:04 AM, George Cristian Bina <george@o...> wrote: > Hi Ihe, > > People asked for a Schematron example that you think cannot be written as an > XPath only test then they wanted to show you the equivalent XPath for that. > > Basically, in Schematron you have > > rule/@context = XPath expression > assert/@test = XPath expression > > these can be written in XPath 2.0 as > > //(context)/test > > where context is the rule/@context expression and test is the assert/@test > expression. > > So, the challenge will be to come up with a Schematron example for which > someone cannot write an XPath equivalent. If you cannot provide such an > example then you should accept that they are equivalent, at least for your > use cases. > I am sorry I have no idea what that challenge has to do with what I have been illustrating. I can spend a moment to reconstruct an analogy revealing the relevant point. I have written a push style stylesheet. My challengers are claiming anything they can write push style they can write pull style. Yes. I accept. The relevant property I am claiming is that in the next iteration of the development my push style stylesheet will be more resilient to changes in the XML structure than my challengers pull style stylesheet. Or to deconstruct the analogy. Lets assume that iteration 2 makes structural changes while retaining the same behaviour. Lets say those changes entail some wrapping and unwrapping of elements and renaming others. Then my claim is that my schematron assertions will require less (if any) rework than your xUnit assertions. So 1. I wouldn't be obliged to respond to any other type of challenge. 2. The other response is I can spin some XQuery or I can write my xUnit (or hire devs) with sufficient skill to do the equivalent of what you are claiming Schematron gives you out of the box then. An admittedly exaggerated analogy to that argument would be a C programmer arguing against the necessity of a language feature native to an object oriented language on grounds that with enough skill and bolt ons, the same effect can be replicated in C. A more nuanced viewpoint would be to see how the inherent robustness of Schematron assertions can be blended with the things that are liked about xUnit. I did at one point consider writing a paper about some of this stuff and some other observations because some of the other ideas that have emerged since developers suddenly decided that they were interested in testing are - shall we say - a bit kookoo. However this brief road test persuades me that it would be better to focus my attention on other challenges. I was toying with the idea
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