URIs and strings (XML Schema comment on F/O)

Dear colleagues,

This note is to ensure that your last-call issues list includes a
question we raised already in our earlier review of the Functions and
Operators specification; in our notes on that spec of last 1 August,
it had item number 1.4 [1].  (I took an action to write you on this
account some time ago.  My apologies for the delay, but I venture
to hope that our concern will not come as a surprise to you.)

While we understand (even if we do not fully agree with) the reasoning
which has led you to make all of the functions for operations upon
URIs accept strings as arguments, we have not understood the reasoning
which leads you to require that they raise an error if they are given
an argument of type anyURI, and we respectfully suggest that you
ensure that these functions can be called upon arguments of type
anyURI without raising a type error, and that the results can where
appropriate conveniently be coerced into type anyURI.

The status quo would have the effect of discouraging the use of the
anyURI type and of encouraging users to lie to their processors by
typing values as strings instead of typing them, more accurately and
more usefully, as URIs.

with best regards,

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
 on behalf of the W3C XML Schema Working Group


[1]
http://www.w3.org/XML/Group/2003/07/xmlschema-fo-comments.html#d0e145

Received on Friday, 27 February 2004 21:21:07 UTC