RE: what's missing in XML? What's coming?

There are some efforts there, but not a lot of standardization yet. Most XQuery frameworks do incorporate some way of retrieving request headers and parameters and body content as well as setting response content types and headers, and the exquery http libs are getting some uptake for server side http, and the work that both Florent Georges and James Fuller is worth noting here, but these are outside of the W3C envelope.

It's actually debatable about the degree of standardization that is necessary here. In most cases these are tied to back-end XML databases - eXist, MarkLogic, EMC's xdb, as part of more extensive libraries, and the degree to which any of these organizations would be willing to change their API to conform to the W3C standards is likely minimal, unless there are obvious benefits to doing so. Sausalito and the 28ms folk are probably closest in that regard, but even there you see existing libraries.

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I don't think vendors need to change their API's to support a standardized API for  server or client HTTP support.

They would just need to supply an additional API library supporting whatever standards come out so that those who want to use the standard library can.   These libraries could be originally supplied by third parties (such as exquery or functx) but eventually if widely adopted could end up being supplied by the vendor.

I think this would be very useful. 

For example, I have  a simple Google Visualization Data Source library in XQuery.

I have currently only implemented the vendor specific bits (get HTTP request, set response type etc) in one vendor's dialect.

However I'd like to publish this for multiple implementations.   But the effort to do so is too high right now so I don't bother.

(I'd have to decide what impl's to support, install them, learn them, test them etc ...)

Since I'm not doing anything really fancy, if I could implement it using a 'common' HTTP library then my job would be done.

In fact because I only have it working in one implementation I haven't published it *at all* even though I made the project home ...

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David A. Lee

dlee@calldei.com

http://www.xmlsh.org