- From: Stephen Buxton <Stephen.Buxton@oracle.com>
- Date: 16 Feb 04 14:26:48
- To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
- Cc:
SECTION 6.6.3: Comment information item It says "Although the data model is able to represent comments, it may be unnecessary or even onerous for some applications to do so. Applications should construct nodes in the data model to represent comments. The decision whether or not to represent comments is considered outside the scope of the data model, consequently the data model makes no attempt to control or identify if any or all comments are ignored." This paragraph is confusing. Either "application" is referring to a program that invokes an XQuery or XPath processor, or "application" means the XQuery or XPath processor itself. In the first interpretation, it is hard to interpret the sentence "Applications should construct nodes in the data model to represent comments" for two reasons: a) it is not the user program's responsibility to construct nodes at all; nodes are a formalism of the data model and not necessarily things that the user program knows how to construct, aside from invoking the XQuery or XPath processor (where is the C or Java library to create a node?) b) It is not the business of the data model to tell users how to write their programs anyway. The second interpretation seems to give the XQuery or XPath processor the license to discard comments from the user's XML data. Granted the user may want them discarded, but there are ways he can express that desire, for example, using XPath expressions that filter out comments. In addition, if the user has explicitly coded a comment constructor in his XQuery expression, is it really right to disregard the user's stated desire to create a comment? If you really intend that XQuery support for comments is optional, then it ought to be called out in the list of optional features (Xquery section 2.6 "Optional features"). - Steve B.
Received on Monday, 16 February 2004 17:26:50 UTC