[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Updating XML
On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, PaulT wrote: > XPath is terse, XUpdate is not. I'm wondering, may there > is any terse alternative to XUpdate? To write those update > queries by hand... To me it looks funny that one can use > 100% pure terse XPath to write a readable query for > 'select', but one should write a verbose XML-ish > spell to make 'update'. > > I don't understansd why XML should be soo different > from SQL in this aspect. I suspect that more logic is exposed at the insertion layer in most XML apps than in most SQL apps - they are just exposing the complexity that is _hidden_ in program code in the typical SQL application. I can simplify the update API - at the cost of shifting that complexity to the more hardwired program layer. The real question is why should a low level database have a primary API oriented to manual processing? It smells like the old 60s/70s push to make programming languages 'English-like' on the theory that non-programmers could then 'program'. With the resulting discovery that even if it looked somewhat like English, writing a non-trivial program still takes a specialist. Our in-house XML update language (it predates XML Update by roughly half a year and is designed to work with existing web browser CGI forms) grew from a dense, terse language to one having a noticable logical resemblance to XML Update as we pushed harder. The denser form just became nearly unreadable and unmaintainable. -- Benjamin Franz "Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." -- Nancy Lebovitz, the button lady
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