Re: XQuery and URIs

On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 04:47:01PM -0500, Mark Baker wrote:
> URI-escaping should work fine as an encoding, I expect, and I thank the
> WG for making that decision.
> 
> But, what now remains absent from the XQuery specification is a
> normative dependency on it as the canonical encoding to be used for
> XQuery documents serialized into URI form.

Speaking for myself here, and not the WG...

Note that it's not generally enough to escape a query in a URI;
you'll need to decide whether to use CGI-style encoding, and if
so, what the variables should be called, and how to name a script
that interfaces to a query...

Or are you expecting a standardised WHEREIS query for a Web page?

Do I do,
http://www.example.org/collections/36/search.pl?query=XXXX
or do I do
http://www.example.org/~user/cgi-bin/q.cgi?srch=XXXX

The best I can suggest here is that you investigate WSDL and Web
Services for a more general mechanism than I believe XML Query
can or should provide.

> We have closed this issue for now; please let us know if this
> disposition is not satisfactory.

> Sorry, it's not. 8-(
Are you asking for the XML Query Specification to have a note saying
that queries can be put in a "GET" URL and escaped as per the URL
RFC?  Or that when embedded in a URL, queries must be escaped
according to the rules of said spec?  Doesn't that follow
automatically from HTTP and the URI/IRI spec?  I'm sorry if I'm
being slow -- I'm missing how interoperability is helped by a
more specific note.  How do you think we should proceed?

Thanks,

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2004 03:18:51 UTC