[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XPath 2.0 - how much of XQuery should it include?
At 1:10 PM -0700 5/10/02, Jonathan Robie wrote: >And when there are so many different kinds of users, and many >different kinds of designers, each with their own perspective. >That's almost always the case in this kind of design work. The tools >we are designing are extremely general. > Maybe they need to be less so. XSLT 1.0/XPath 1.0 was designed for document transformations and browser display. It was not designed as a general purpose XML query language. Now that new and very different use cases and requirements are getting piled on top of it, it's beginning to look not nearly as pretty. I think maybe we need less general tools, not more. I think perhaps it's time to consider whether merging XQuery and XPath and XSLT actually makes sense. This may have been a mistake. The needs of the communities involved may be just too different for them to comfortably use the same tools. Unfortunately, the W3C culture makes it very difficult (close to impossible really) to admit that occasionally specs go off the rails, and need to be scrapped so that work can begin from scratch using the lessons learned from the failed project. I'm not 100% convinced XSLT/XPath is in that position now. I'm maybe 50% convinced. But I do think we need to honestly ask the question, and be open to the possibility of tossing a year's worth of work if that work proves to be fundamentally flawed. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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