Re: Layering XPath/XSLT namespaces is unacceptable

----- Original Message -----
From: "David G. Durand" <david@dynamicDiagrams.com>
To: <xml-uri@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 6:11 PM
Subject: Re: Layering XPath/XSLT namespaces is unacceptable


>
> There's no reason that one can't refer to the definition of a UIR and
> not a URI reference and not be consistent (I'm assuming that by
> "constant" you meant consistent, as otherwise I can't understand what
> you're saying).


I think I used the word "constant" first.  It's probably not appropriate in
retrospect, but the idea I had comes from my use of persistent XML and XPath
as a query language:  I want the qualified name of an prefix:localname pair
to be fixed when a document is stored; if it can vary depending on the base
URI of the document into which another document is loaded, linked, etc.,
things get much more complex very quickly.  I also do require the qname to
be consistent between the XPath/XSLT "view" of an XML document and the XML
document itself.

>>Fixing XPath so one can get at the literal namespace attribute sounds
>>it has a reasonable claim to restoring continuity and orderly layering.

>It seems to add complexity with no clearly defined use case.

I completely agree.  As someone pointed out, there's always SGML and its
armamentum of powerful, complex related standards if you really need it, but
don't expect XML to evolve to fit SGML's use cases.  XML is a "hit" because
it makes it easy to do what *should* be easy (like exchange structured
messages and simple documents).  Burdening it with features that aren't
clearly necessary to solve real problems will just put XML in the bind that
SGML found itself -- a wonderfully powerful spec that *nobody* completely
implemented and very few really understood.

Received on Wednesday, 14 June 2000 18:37:33 UTC