[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: WS-Addressing to W3C: Is the Tide Turning?
Michael Kay wrote: > No, I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. The size of the > task is no larger than that tackled by XSLT 1.0, which was produced in 18 > months, and which involved at least as much innovation. The problem is a > social one: there are at least five individuals on the XQuery WG who could > have produced a perfectly usable spec two years ago if the other four > individuals had not been present. I agree that the design would have been done a lot faster if fewer people were involved, but I don't think this is the only or even the main issue. I do think that XQuery required much more innovation than XSLT. I think that DSSSL solved many (perhaps most?) of the really hard problems for XSLT, and we hard a really good idea what it could and could not do. There were many prior XML and SGML query languages, and many database query languages, but XQuery is significantly different from any of them for reasons that go to the heart of programming with XML. SQL and OQL are not well suited to the semantics or the data model of XML - XQL solved the semantic mismatch with XML, but was still only a way of retrieving information. XML-QL was great at doing arbitrary data-oriented transforms that could be optimized, but it ignored most of the structure of XML. YATL had about the same virtues as XML-QL, with a more compact syntax. The XML Query Working Group took all the use cases submitted, and tried to solve them with about 7 different existing languages, and none were good at the full spectrum of problems to be solved. For XQuery, the nearest equivalent to DSSSL was Quilt, which was first presented in mid 2000. Quilt solved most of the use cases fairly well, but before Quilt, some crucially important innovation had not occurred. Quilt had some syntactic issues that needed to be fixed, and it had not thought seriously about types, namespaces, XML Schema, compatibility with XPath 1.0, coordination with the XSL Working Group, etc. I suspect that namespaces and XML Schema probably cost us about a year, and coordination with XSL and XPath probably cost us about a year, but these two years of effort did improve the final product. I think we also did a good year's worth of useful changes to the language. So that's a total of 3 years, bringing us up to 2003. But that doesn't factor in time for the Formal Semantics, which probably cost us at least another year. Although it is not equally important in all environments, for some implementations, including ours, the Formal Semantics is turning out to be very valuable. And at least another year goes in to processing tons of detailed feedback from companies that are members of the Working Groups and a few comments from the general public. I agree with Michael that we could have been done by now. I personally think that having several individuals involved in the design has generally improved the language, and I don't think it has cost us as much time as Michael does. In the early days, no one individual really knew what was needed to design this language well. I agree that there are now at least five people who could do it, and that's partly due to having learned from each other. But we have been solving some pretty important issues. We finally fixed some important namespace-related issues just last week, and the last published Working Drafts vastly simplify construction and validation. And the discussion among a group of people has been important for getting this design right. But there's really not that much real work that still needs to be done. We have to dispose of the outstanding issues, and stop spending too much time on issues that don't matter. And we have to do a thorough enough review of our own documents so that Working Group members don't submit the lion's share of 1200 public comments when the next Last Call drafts go out, as they did the last time around If there were only one engineer, no public comments to deal with, no existing specs to be compatible with, and no formal process, this would indeed go a lot faster. Hey, with three engineers, that's what we did with Quilt, and we did that in about 5 months. With a group that small, you don't need much process. But in the environment we now live in, if we don't master the process, we will never get done. Jonathan
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