RE: [Serial] I18N WG last call comments

Hello Michael,

At 17:52 04/05/06 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:

> >
> > 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.

I may, or I may not. Given the complexity of the XSLT/XQuery specs,
and the fact that I'm dealing with a lot of other things (not to
speak about the rest of the I18N WG), it might not necessarily
come as a surprise.


>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.

There is no problem with that, if indeed these values are typed as
xs:NMTOKENS. But we strongly suspect that there is a problem if there
are some values that are just simple strings. The fact that simple
strings and text nodes are not treated in the same way, we suspect,
will often lead to confusion.


>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.

Would it be possible for you to write the following three examples:

- An example (such as above with "red", "green", "blue", but with the
   actual code) where these are e.g. NMTOKENS, and where the serialization
   with spaces makes sense.

- An example with e.g. strings used as intermediate text in a formating-
   like operation (a la printf in C), where inserting spaces would happen,
   but would not be desired.

- The previous example with the above 'string-join' function used to
   avoid the problems with spaces.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Monday, 24 May 2004 05:32:08 UTC