Tool development: by Perl-wrapped XQuery

[David A. Lee]

Hello, Hans-Juergen

I do believe you are understanding my perspective.  It give me hope that 
perhaps it is not a singular one and I'm not utterly and entirely insane.

You've made some interesting comments !

> 2. (but also) XML Schemas (!) 
> => xsd info commands
>   
I had never thought of this !
> There were no "schemas" to describe byte streams, but we have them to describe item streams, and I think here is a great demand of standard tools unlocking their wealth of information. For example:
>
> get-simple-type myElementName | simple-type-pattern
> => yielding the pattern constraining an element (e.g.  "\D\D\D\d+"), or
>
> get-paths myFile | invalid-paths myTargetNamespacePrefix
> => yielding any paths not compatible with a certain schema.
>   
Wow those are great ideas.  I need to think about what they mean and how 
one would make use of them.
The last one could be implemented by iteration over  "xvalidate"  .. 
.but building this into something like a "find" command or even making 
type validity and information at a very low level as apposed to just a 
command level is interesting.   Also considering that a document (or an 
element) can have multiple types simultaneously brings on a level of 
complexity.   What do we do with these commands ?

> I used to regard XProc as *the* enabler, *the* integrator. Now I get a feeling that one might look at XProc and xmlsh as sister technologies resembling XSLT and XQuery: both built on the same basis, the XDM and the XPath language; the former a little more powerful and feature-rich, with the cost of rather heavy syntax, the latter very slender and flexible.
>
> With kind regards,
> Hans-Juergen
>   
I disagree that xproc is more "feature-rich" then xmlsh but we can leave 
that debate for another day.
The important thing, IMHO, is that having these multiple languages and 
tools demonstrate the importance of integration technologies, and that 
there is more then one way to do it.  Once we know there are 2 ways to 
do something we can discover there are 10 or 1000 ... and as you 
indicated this opens up a really interesting area that is really at a 
different level of thought then any one particular technology, but 
rather  how a system based on XML concepts can behave, not limited to 
one technology.  I think this is an exciting phase in XML technologies.

-David

-- 
David A. Lee
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