Difficulty to read patterns as expressed with XPath 2.0

The patterns in the XML Schema Patterns for Databinding  
specifications are written as XPath 2.0 expressions.

While this makes them compact, very well defined, and checkable  
automatically with tools, it makes it hard for an average developer  
to read the specification.

Developers may generally be familiar with XPath 1.0, but this is not  
the case with XPath 2.0 at this point. The document would greatly  
benefit from:
- an introductory section about how XPath 2.0 is used and how to read  
the type of XPath 2.0 expressions used in the document. I would  
recommend illustrating this XPath 2.0 by using a non-trivial  
expression, and walking through it with examples to help readers  
understand.
- examples for each variation of each pattern described; for example,  
in the Basic Patterns specification, 2.12.3  
ComplexTypeAttributeExtension does not have any examples and is not  
easy to read.

I believe that the documents produced by this working group are very  
useful to Web services developers. It's therefore important to make  
it understandable to the largest audience possible.

Regards,

Hugo

Received on Tuesday, 27 February 2007 19:34:35 UTC