Re: [XPath] Backwards compatibility of A<B

Michael,
Thanks for your reply

> (Note: XPath 1.0 would attempt a numeric comparison even if one of the
> arguments was a string. So there is still a backwards incompatibility.
> However, it is far less likely to arise in practice.) 

While I have argued elsewhere that any incompatibility (and the necessity
of a backwards compatibility mode) should really be seen as a failure
on the part of W3C to preserve the integrity of its specifications from
one version to the next, some such failure is usually unavoidable, so
it's down to personal judgemet as to how much incompatibility is
acceptable. 

In this case, given where we are, I would be happy to accept a change
that made the comparisons work as before on untyped data as resolving my
comment satisfactorily, I would be very surprised if I found a real
example in my code that required the numeric conversion from strings
(although it would be easy enough to construct an example of course)

David

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2004 18:22:50 UTC