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

From an XQuery point of view, I agree with Per. There is also the
question of closure for many systems.

If the XML Data model producer recognizes a text node as input and is a
normal XML fragment parser, I find it not acceptable to standardize the
more complex requirement that your data model producer needs to be able
to understand specialized markup.

Best regards
Michael

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-qt-comments-request@w3.org [mailto:public-qt-comments-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Per Bothner
> Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 12:05 AM
> To: Kay, Michael
> Cc: public-qt-comments@w3.org
> Subject: Re: [XQuery] SAG-XQ-005 Serializing Arbitrary Sequences
> 
> 
> Kay, Michael wrote:
> 
> >  > 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.
> 
> E.g. given some numbers, I might want to produce a "report" like:
> 
>    The max is 99 and the min is 5.
> 
> A user expect to be able to write:
> 
>    "The max is ",max($vals)," and the min is ",min($vals),"."
> 
> or:
> 
>    concat("The max is ",max($vals)," and the min is ",min($vals),".")
> 
> depending on what the standard specifies wrt to whitespace.  But it is
> useful for the standard to specify a specific result so I know what
> output to expect for a given program.
> 
> > And if it's for humans to read, wouldn't one want to produce
something
> > richer than a string of ASCII characters?
> 
> True most of the time.  But sometimes one wants to be able to generate
> simple non-HTML output.  I think this is a useful feature, and I think
> people will expect portable results.
> 
> Perhaps the "text output model" sufficies for these applications - but
> unfortunately there appears to be no standard way to set serialization
> parameters in an XQuery program, like you can for XSLT.  Also, it
seems
> less intuitive to have to write:
> 
>    <result>The max is {max($vals)} and the min is
{min($vals)}.</result>
> 
> only to want the <result></result> to disappear.
> --
> 	--Per Bothner
> per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2003 12:31:14 UTC