RE: [XQuery] SAG-XQ-002 Input collection

I personally do not think that there are enough use cases and experience
yet to justify an interoperability requirement of implicit input
collections. I think that the explicit syntax for now suffices and this
functionality can be revisited in a future version. 

 

Another reason for my preference for making this a vNext feature is that
such functionality is an addition to the existing spec and requires a
fair amount of additional work, including specifying the static
semantics (which is not that simple as we currently see with the
semantics of /a). 

 

I rather close the spec and only add something if it meets a very high
bar at this time...

 

Best regards

Michael (speaking for himself)

 

  _____  

From: public-qt-comments-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-qt-comments-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Kay, Michael
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2003 3:57 AM
To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
Subject: [XQuery] SAG-XQ-002 Input collection

 

SAG-XQ-002 Input collection 

We regret that there is no simple intuitive way of writing a query whose
input is some implicit (context-defined) collection of documents.

The input() function went some way to meeting this need, but this has
disappeared. 

The context item is restricted to a single node or value, which sends
the wrong message about the purpose of XQuery, which is that it is
designed primarily to process large collections of documents, unlike
XPath, which is designed primarily to locate nodes within a single
document.

Other mechanisms for supplying a collection as input to the query (using
parameter variables, and using the collection() function) are
syntactically cumbersome.

We think that for XQuery (as distinct from XPath and XSLT) the concept
of an implicit input collection is a useful one, and that there should
be a convenient syntax to refer to it. (How about "~", or perhaps "$$"?)

Michael Kay 
for Software AG