RE: [XQuery] SAG-XQ-005 Serializing Arbitrary Sequences

> 
> >  > I think there is a need for "human-readable" serialization,  > 
> > which does not necessarily have to be reversible.
> > 
> > I agree that products will want to produce such output, but does it 
> > have
> > to be standardized? If it's only for humans to read, and not for 
> > software to read, why do we need to specify its format?
> 
> Because someone might want to (say) generate a report or a 
> file as a text (non-html) file, and it is useful to have a 
> standard for this.
> 

But you can do this (as you do in XSLT) by producing a single document node
as the result of your query, and serializing it using the text output
method.

Your second example produced a string as the result of a query, and I think
it's likely that most products would provide a way of serializing a string
without us needing to write a spec for it.

Michael Kay