SAG-XQ-02 Additional axes

We believe that it should be made clear that an XQuery processor is
permitted to support any of the axes specified in XPath, including those
that are not defined in XQuery. 

We have come to the conclusion that some of the excluded axes - certainly
the ancestor axis, and perhaps also the sibling axes - need to be provided
for usability reasons. We do not provide them in our current product and
users sometimes have difficulty finding a circumvention.

In fact the current specification does not actually say that implementations
are not allowed to provide extensions of this nature, but this appears to be
the general intent, since an extensibility mechanism is defined in section
2.6.4.

Michael Kay
Software AG

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 2003 11:49:45 UTC