RE: [Serial] I18N WG last call comments

> 
> Hello Henry,
> 
> Many thanks for your responses. The I18N WG (Core TF) has looked
> at your response below, and unfortunately, we have to say that we
> cannot accept it. At the least, we need some more information
> exchange to make sure we understand each other well.
> 
> Below, you write that the convention of inserting a space isn't
> for linguistic separation, but for creating XML Schema lists.
> This may be the intention of the spec-writers, but who guarantees
> that this is how this will be used? 

Sorry, Martin, but I think you have completely missed the point here. If an
XML Schema declares the colors attribute as having type xs:NMTOKENS, and the
typed value is the sequence ("red", "green", "blue"), then the correct
lexical representation of this according to the rules in XML Schema is
colors="red green blue". If you don't like that, you need to complain to the
XML Schema WG.

The places where XSLT/XQuery use space as a default separator are all
associated with converting a typed value to the string value of a node, and
are therefore closely associated with this XML Schema convention for
representing lists. Of course we can't totally control how the facility is
used, but we do provide a string-join function that allows any separator to
be used in the lexical representation of a sequence, so we are not imposing
any constraints on users.

Michael Kay

Received on Thursday, 6 May 2004 12:53:42 UTC