Re: status quo

At 01:33 PM 5/21/00 -0500, Al Gilman wrote:
>At 10:39 AM 2000-05-21 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>>
>>Treat XPath as a layer on top of XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML, and this is
>>just application-specific behavior (in XPath) that expands on the
>>possibilities in XML and Namespaces.
>>
>
>This is promising.
>
>The term "application-specific" may be misunderstood, as XPath is clearly
>core XML technology for XML 2.0.  One might want to simply say "layered" or
>something else.  For any plan of resolution, however, it is important to
>recognize that [/ ascertain if] nothing in the technology platform created
>by "XML 1.0 + Namespaces" prevents a layered document [in this case XPath]
>from asserting such semantics.

That's fine - I called it application-specific rather than layered because
'layered' produces resistance in some quarters.

I don't think it'll be hard to find agreement that while Namespaces in XML
doesn't support XPath's behavior explicitly, neither does it prohibit it.
That was more or less my hope with the 'status quo' position.  To some
extent, the ambiguity in the Namespaces spec could be a cause for rejoicing
rather than turmoil.

>There would appear to be a problem reconciling the approaches in XPath and
>XSLT as we look to form XML Core for XML 2.0.  That is where the problem
>lies, in process space, IMHO.

XML 2.0 seems like it will be a point at which breaking backward
compatibility may be discussed appropriately.  I'm not sure the world is
nearly ready for XML 2.0, but that does seem like the right place to clean
up this issue, should such cleanup be seen as necessary.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Sunday, 21 May 2000 13:35:07 UTC