Re: ACTION 614-12: Smart Quotes from Michael Kay on 2015-09-20 (public-xsl-query@w3.org from September 2015)

From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 23:14:46 +0100
To: Florent Georges <fgeorges@fgeorges.org>
Cc: Abel Braaksma <abel.braaksma@xs4all.nl>, Public Joint XSLT XQuery XPath <public-xsl-query@w3.org>
Message-Id: <307EFF99-DC6C-4C2D-BC27-9367D831AB32@saxonica.com>

> 
> I would have assumed it to be XQuery-only as well.  This is about
> constructing text nodes, and XPath does not have node constructors
> (literal elements for instance).  This is rather done in XQuery (or
> XSLT, but XSLT already has such a mechanism).
> 

It’s actually about constructing strings rather than text nodes, but I think similar reasoning applies.

XPath is designed for embedding in other languages, and the problems of escaping special characters depend very much on the escaping conventions of the language in which it is embedded. A solution that works for one host language might work very badly for another.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

Received on Sunday, 20 September 2015 22:15:11 UTC