Re: Fw: [Serialization] IBM-SE-001: Documentization

Henry,
Thanks for your response. I understand why the working group has chosen 
not to provide this feature in XQuery Version 1, and I do not intend to 
pursue this issue further at this time.
Regards,
--Don Chamberlin




Henry Zongaro/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA 
03/27/2004 06:51 PM

To
Don Chamberlin/Almaden/IBM@IBMUS, XML Query/Almaden/IBM@IBMUS
cc
public-qt-comments@w3.org
Subject
Fw: [Serialization] IBM-SE-001: Documentization





Don,

     In [1] you submitted the following comment on the serialization 
draft:

Don Chamberlin wrote on 2004-02-02 06:37:20 PM:
> Serialization Section 2, "Serializing Arbitrary Data Models": This 
> comment recapitulates a discussion from a recent (21 January) 
> meeting of the Query and XSLT working groups. It is suggested that 
> the serialization document should define two separate and 
> independent processes, possibly called "documentization" and 
"serialization". 
> 
> The documentization process should be defined to convert any Query 
> Data Model (QDM) instance (which in general may contain zero, one, 
> or many documents, or documents mixed with non-document fragments) 
> into a QDM instance that contains exactly one document. This can be 
> done by replacing each top-level item in the QDM instance by a 
> descriptive "wrapper" element that labels it with its kind: 
> attribute, atomic value, element, document, etc. A new synthetic 
> document element is then inserted as parent of all the wrapper 
> elements.  This documentization process (unlike the one currently 
> described in Section 2) should apply successfully to any QDM 
> instance whatsoever. Thus (for example) if the QDM instance contains
> multiple documents, the boundaries between these documents is 
> preserved. If documentization is invoked on a QDM instance that 
> already contains a single document, that document is nevertheless 
> wrapped in a descriptive element which is placed under a new 
> synthetic parent document node (it is treated simply as a sequence 
> of documents of length one). 
> 
> The serialization process then needs to be defined only for QDM 
> instances that contain exactly one document. A serialization 
> parameter can be defined to control whether documentization is 
> applied before serialization (possibly documentization could be 
> defined to occur by default if the first item in the sequence to be 
> serialized is not a node). 

     Thank you for submitting this comment.

     The XSL and XQuery working groups considered your comment and related 
comments.  There was general agreement that there is some need for a 
mechanism for serializing arbitrary sequences that preserves most or all 
of the properties of the items in an arbitrary sequence that is being 
serialized.

     However, the working groups decided that precisely defining all of 
the requirements for such a mechanism at this stage would be difficult, 
and would likely lead to a solution that would not satisfy real user 
requirements.  Therefore, the working groups decided to consider such a 
feature for a future revision of the recommendations, and close this 
comment without any changes to the specifications.

     May I ask you to confirm that this resolution is acceptable?

Thanks,

Henry
[1] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004Feb/0049.html
------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry Zongaro      Xalan development
IBM SWS Toronto Lab   T/L 969-6044;  Phone +1 905 413-6044
mailto:zongaro@ca.ibm.com