Re: XSL intent survey

Lawton, Scott <slawton@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>The w3c recently had a conference on query languages; the position papers
>are well worth reading -- if you can find the time!  (I've only gone thru
>about a third of them.)


Thanks for the pointer. I've just glanced through some of them. Definitely
worth reading. For those who are interested, the direct link to the list of
papers is http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp.html. A pity that some of the
papers can only be viewed by W3C members, but there's a lot of good stuff
anyone can look at.

It is obviously useful for the XSL pattern language to be compatible with
X-Query-L (whatever it turns out to be). Several papers refer to the
excellent point that the mechanism for constructing the results should also
be compatible between the two languages. See the XSL working group's
position paper for example
(http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/xsl-wg-position.html).

Of course, if this happens, one would be forced to consider whether XSL
shouldn't be specified as the set of formatting objects. The part of the
specifications describing the transformational capabilities would replaced
by a reference to X-Query-L. This would require the "construction" part of
X-Query-L to be stronger then is customary for a query language, but the
benefits would be great.

Share & Enjoy,

    Oren Ben-Kiki


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