May F&O: references to Xquery.

I believe that it is important that one should be able to follow the
full specification of XSLT without needing to read the Xquery
specification. Currently the F&O refers to Xquery specification
in several references and has Xquery examples, both of these should be
avoided, or supplemented with Xpath equivalents.

This means that the Functions and operators document
should refer to Xpath (or Xpath and xquery) where this is appropriate.
As Xpath and Xquery are generated from shared XML source, your
production stylesheets ought to be able to generate suitable link texts
to any reference to a shared part of the document, I would have thought.

One particular example is the first paragraph of section 3

  For a more detailed treatment of error handing see section 2.5.1 of
  [XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language] and section 6.2.1 of [XQuery 1.0
  and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics].

The text on error handling is also in Xpath (also section 2.5.1 as it
happens) and an explicit reference to this should be given.
One could search the F&O document for similar references to Xquery
and add matching references to XPath, although as I say above I would
have thought that the XSLt stylesheet could be extended to do this
automatically, which is more likely to catch them all.


An example of Xquery use in examples is 15.3.4 fn:min

      let $ordered-vals :=
        for $val in $srcval
        where $val ne $val
        order by $val
        return $val
      return $ordered-vals[1]

This could be done in Xpath in several ways, eg

 $srcval[. <= $srcval][1]
  

David

________________________________________________________________________
This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star Internet. The
service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive
anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit:
http://www.star.net.uk
________________________________________________________________________

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2003 09:02:49 UTC