RE: [XPath/XQuery] collections

> 
> Collections look like a nice concept, but they don't 
> currently exist on the Web. It's straightforward to take a 
> document identified by an URI and use the Web to access that 
> document. For collections, there is no protocol or mechanism. 
> The way the specs currently read, they will either stay 
> vaporware or be badly implementation-dependent.
> 

The collection concept has indeed caused some difficulty. It is intended
as an abstraction of an XML database or a portion thereof. For most
concrete implementations of XML databases (and, I understand, for
systems that provide an XML view of a relational database) it's possible
to identify a reasonably natural realisation of this concept, but it's
true that people have difficulty understanding it at the abstract level.
We've deliberately steered clear of defining, for example, whether
collections can contain sub-collections, because this does become very
implementation-dependent.

Michael Kay (speaking personally)

Received on Sunday, 15 February 2004 18:33:11 UTC