Re: [Serial] I18N WG last call comments

Hi Martin,

On today's telcon, the XSL and XQuery WGs endorsed the text of the 
personal comments I made this morning in the following email. I now 
submit this again, as an official response on behalf of the XSL and 
XQuery Working Groups.

Thanks!

Jonathan

Jonathan Robie wrote:
> 
> Martin Duerst wrote:
> 
>> Overall, I think that the convention of using a space between
>> strings, inherited from SGML NMTOKENS and IDREFS, should not be the
>> default in XQuery and XSLT to contatenate strings.
> 
> 
> Hi Martin,
> 
> For concatenating strings, which is what the concat() function does, we 
> do not insert anything. I think Henry has shown [1] that our string 
> manipulation library is pretty good at allowing other delimiters to be 
> inserted if needed.
> 
> Serializing a sequence of atomic values is not the same thing as 
> "concatenating strings". The lexical representation of these atomic 
> values is given by XML Schema, and the delimiters used are the 
> delimiters used by XML Schema. The default for serializing a sequence of 
> tokens defined by XML Schema pretty much has to be the format defined by 
> XML Schema, or else XML processors won't be able to read serialized 
> documents. So for serialization, I think your beef is with XML Schema.
> 
> Linguistic tokens and delimiters are not the same as computerlanguage 
> tokens and delimiters. In my opinion, the biggest problem occurs not 
> when they differ, but when they are the same. That's why we have to 
> invent conventions like camelCase or hyphenated-names to allow ourselves 
> to create computer language tokens that consist of multiple linguistic 
> tokens. XML Schema could have allowed users to create a sequence of 
> string values that contain spaces, as in:
> 
> <sequenceOfRoads>Gibson Road, Main Street</sequenceOfRoads>
> 
> That would require XML Schema to allow an alternate delimiter to be 
> specified. It doesn't. And it shouldn't - in XML, the best way to 
> delimit individual items is to use markup:
> 
> <roads>
>   <road>Gibson Road</road>
>   <road>Main Street</road>
> </roads>
> 
> As a markup language, XML exists for the sole purpose of clearly 
> identifying data. Let's use it! The alternative is to use microparsing. 
> But that's not how XML works, and XQuery is based on XML.
> 
> We support XML Schema, and that's what our serialization does by 
> default. If you want a different serialization, you can use string 
> manipulation to create whatever you want, but an XML Schema processor 
> won't be able to recognize the tokens.
> 
> Jonathan
> My opinion only. Not on behalf of anyone.
>

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 2004 18:48:53 UTC