Re: [xml-dev] The use of XML syntax in XML Query

• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@softwareag.com>
• Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 10:46:44 -0500
• To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>, ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson), David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
• Cc: www-xml-query-comments@w3.org, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.0.20020103103609.044efda0@softwareag.com>

At 10:09 AM 1/3/2002 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>There are two ways to fix this:
>
>1. The XSLT solution: Make all XQueries complete, well-formed, XML documents

XQueryX does that. Personally, I'm not sure that XQueryX is something that 
users would want to write, so it is not the solution to David's problem.

>2. The XPath solution: Make all XQueries look nothing like XML documents; 
>i.e. no tags, no elements, no attributes

Computed element constructor syntax allows this. Here is Henry's example 
done in computed element constructor syntax, where the wrapping element is 
in the XML document, and nothing in the query per se looks like XML:

<myQR>
element bib
{
    for $b in document("http://www.bn.com")/bib/book
    where $b/publisher = "Addison-Wesley" and $b/@year > 1991
    return
      element livre
      {
         attribute ann&#xe9;e { $b/@year },
         element cr&#xe9;ateur { $b/author },
         $b/title
      }
}
</myQR>


Rusty, wisely, did not mention embedding queries in CDATA sections as a 
possible solution. The problem with CDATA Sections is that they do not 
allow character references to be expanded, so they do not help with the 
problem that David is trying to solve.


Jonathan

Received on Thursday, 3 January 2002 10:54:43 UTC