Re: How we are being silently manipulated - a fresh example - Was: Re: QT4CG meeting 120 draft minutes, 6 May 2025

> Our modus operandi is for detailed technical discussions to take place in
writing before we take a decision in a meeting.
> There is no need for all the technical arguments to be repeated verbally
in the meeting - it is assumed that attendees
> have prepared for the meeting by reading the discussion thread.

The fact remains that this most serious issue was not pointed out by the
presenter - and not out of forgetfulness.

Let us be well aware that we are being manipulated - even when this is
being justified with "good intentions and logistics".

I still hope that we are going to address the issue and find a satisfactory
solution - contrary to the attempt to hide it.

Dimitre Novatchev,

On Tue, May 6, 2025 at 10:54 AM Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:

> I think we are all well aware that the handling of empty sequences in path
> expressions is a mixed blessing: it means that $BOOK / AUTHOR / NAME
> returns the names of all the authors of the book whether the book has 0, 1,
> or many authors; but at the same time it means that if the element name
> AUTHOR is misspelled, no error is reported.
>
> In 3.1 we reproduced this behaviour with lookup of fields in records
> ($BOOK ? AUTHOR ? NAME), and this PR extended this to lookup with methods
> ($BOOK ? AUTHOR() ? NAME()). The construct $BOOK ! AUTHOR ! NAME also
> follows the same pattern - emptiness is propagated down the path, rather
> than being treated as erroneous. Consistency is important for usability,
> and this handling of hierarchic selection paths is absolutely intrinsic to
> the style and character of XPath as a language.
>
> Since it is not an error for a book to have no authors, there is no
> "swallowing" of any error - the expression is not erroneous so there is no
> error to swallow, and this applies to all these cases.
>
> The corrollory that XPath doesn't detect misspelled selectors in a path is
> indeed a serious problem that costs developers hours of effort. This was
> recognized soon after XPath 1.0 and the introduction of schema awareness
> was an attempt to solve it, with mixed success. I think the functions such
> as exactly-one() were also introduced with this in mind; the idea was that
> if you expected a book to have exactly one author, you could write
> $BOOK/exactly-one(AUTHOR)/exactly-one(NAME). But hardly anyone does so;
> people will always write the code that is easiest to write, rather than the
> code that is most robust.
>
> But the rule about a dynamic function call requiring a singleton wasn't
> really a solution to that problem, it only detected it in a very small
> minority of cases, and it did so more by accident than by design.  We
> should look for better solutions to that problem, which is what issue 1979
> strives to do.
>
> Our modus operandi is for detailed technical discussions to take place in
> writing before we take a decision in a meeting. There is no need for all
> the technical arguments to be repeated verbally in the meeting - it is
> assumed that attendees have prepared for the meeting by reading the
> discussion thread.
>
> Michael Kay
>
>
>

-- 
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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