[Bug 2405] QueryBody for MainModule can be very difficult to parse

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=2405





------- Additional Comments From mike@saxonica.com  2005-10-21 15:13 -------
You can tell when you've reached the end of the prolog if the next two tokens
aren't one of the pairs that can start a prolog declaration, for example
"declare default" or "import schema" or "declare function".

I'm afraid it's not good timing for a comment like this. If it had come during
the last call period, the WG would have happily given it a hearing. Given that
there are at least a dozen implementors who have solved this problem, it's
unlikely that you're now going to convince the WG to change the language. In any
case, the language should be designed for the convenience of users, not of
implementors.

The solution you propose would lose the nice property that every valid XPath
expression is also a valid query. It would also add a lot of red-tape for people
wanting to write simple one-line queries, perhaps embedded in a Java program or
written interactively in a dialog box. And there are plenty of other cases where
parsing needs to be a little bit context-sensitive (as your "gibberish" example
demonstrates).

Michael Kay (personal response)

Received on Friday, 21 October 2005 15:14:11 UTC