[Bug 4869] [FS] Enclosed expressions and namespaces

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4869





------- Comment #10 from davidc@nag.co.uk  2007-09-11 14:51 -------
(In reply to comment #9)

> the trouble of achieving the same thinhg in XQueryX(if at all possible?)

Fixing the XQueryX isn't hard (see comment #7)

> 
> What does the distinction add to the language? Can it be safely removed?
> 

Any language can be changed of course but this would be quite a big change.

The 
declare copy-namespaces 
declaration only affects nodes that are being copied not nodes that are being
created. It's a general feature of xquery I think that there is little
syntactic difference between querying copying and creating nodes, (this is in
contrast to xslt where these are far more distinct, and all of them are far
more verbose)
in xquery you can go
/a/<x><y/></x>/<x>{<z/>}</x>
to query existing nodes (a) generate new nodes (x,y) or copy (newly created)
nodes (z), XSLT forces you to breakout of the path expression and use
xsl:element or literal result elements (to create) or xsl:copy-of (to copy) but
surely it's an explicit design goal of the XQuery syntax to be more
compositional and allow these things to be mixed. So the small syntactic
difference here is a natural (if initially surprising) feature of XQuery rather
than something that needs changing

David

Received on Tuesday, 11 September 2007 14:51:29 UTC