- From: Jonathan Robie <jwrobie@mindspring.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:55:00 -0500
- To: Michael Kay <mhk@mhk.me.uk>
- Cc: 'Don Chamberlin' <chamberl@almaden.ibm.com>, public-qt-comments@w3.org
Michael Kay wrote: >>Then perhaps the XSLT spec can describe things in terms of namespace >>nodes - these are equivalent descriptions, and the XSLT spec could >>describe how to map between them. >> >> > >It's very easy to have a language that doesn't make use of some of the >information content in the data model, such as the identity and >parentage of namespace nodes. It's much harder, and less desirable, for >a language to supplement the data model with additional information. > > But it's also undesirable for a language to represent abstract declarations, such as namespace declarations, with concrete nodes that have identity and must be serializable, although they have no direct representation in an XML document. XSLT could achieve the nice properties you desire by making the same change XQuery wants to make, defining the scope of namespaces without using namespace nodes - but there are, of course, backwards compatibility issues. I don't think XQuery should be burdened by these backwards compatibility issues. >And don't forget that XPath supports the namespace axis too. > > Yes, but it is deprecated. I suppose a compromise position would be to define the namespace axis in terms of the namespaces that are in scope - let it create "namespace nodes" to represent the namespaces that are in scope. This kind of crud is less objectionable in the description of a deprecated feature. >And I strongly suspect that when XQuery users discover the need to >create namespaces that aren't known statically (as they will), then >XQuery will want this capability too. > > Possibly, but I doubt very much that XQuery would do this by explicitly creating namespace nodes - it is much more likely that we would remove the restriction that the URI for a namespace declaration attribute must be a constant. Jonathan
Received on Thursday, 12 February 2004 14:57:32 UTC