[General] Typing issues

It is not too difficult to predict that typing will be a headache
for many people for XQuery and XSLT2. Please do anything and everything
that you can to reduce the problems.

The different concepts around types, the different types, the different
rules for conversion,... will make typing very difficult to use. It would
be very good to have some section (maybe an appendix) summarizing all
the rules, and giving people a chance to get an overall grasp. Giving
parallels e.g. to well-known programming languages (if and where they
exist) may also help.

Another issue is that it is not completely predictable, and not
completely interoperable, which XML Schemas will be taken into
account and which not. XQuery Schema Import does a lot to make this
more predictable, but this should be completely predictable.
'augmentable by implementation' does not lead to interoperability.

A typical example of this is the "implementation-dependent mechanism
for determining whether an unknown type is compatible..." in
2.4.4 of XPath.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Sunday, 15 February 2004 16:40:03 UTC