- From: Jeff Chapman <Jeff.Chapman@pervasive.com>
- Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 15:26:08 -0600
- To: www-ql@w3.org
- Message-ID: <1B5B8075481CD41185BF00508B64ED961D72E0@ausmail4.aus.pervasive.com>
First and foremost, I really appreciate the work that's being done here. I really value any effort to improve the ease of XML development and XQuery seems well on it's way to accomplish this. In a recent reply to Evan Lenz, Jonathan Robie asserts that "the purpose of FLWR expressions, ... is to provide general SQL-like functionality for joins and declarative restructuring". Is the charter of the XQuery WG to solve the query problem for XML developers, or to make life easier for SQL applications and SQL programmers. To me, these seem like two different problem domains. However, XQuery seems to be more focused on the "SQL-like functionality" issue. IMHO, in our effort to make XQuery look familiar to SQL coders, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Specifically, I'm deeply troubled that an XQuery expression is not valid XML. This will immediately cause problems when I try to store XQuery documents into an XML repository. This should trigger a sense of Deja Vu. Aren't we ignoring a painful lesson from our immediate past. When people realized the gravity of the situation caused by DTDs not being valid XML, the W3C immediately began work on a solution--XML Schemas. Unfortunately, XML Developers are now left scrambling to support two completely different schema definition mechanisms. If you're an XML tool vendor then this will guarantee that customers will pay for upgrades on a very frequent basis. However, I would hope we would recognize that this was a mistake and learn from it, instead of repeating that mistake with an XQuery syntax that is not valid XML. Also, my hope is that we're actually going to solve the key problems which make it really difficult to use XML for data-centric instead of document-centric purposes--and I don't mean to make XML look more like SQL. Toward that end, the lack of Update capabilities is a huge hole. While I value the improvements in ease of use, I question the decision to invest in a SQL-like syntax that isn't even valid XML while completely avoiding the critical "Update" issue. Without this functionality, data repository vendors and application developers will continue to be forced to invested heavily in proprietary tactics that further fragment and isolate XML developers into vendor-specific camps. Clearly, this is something that the W3C should not encourage, either explicitly or implicitly. Jeff Chapman Principal Web Architect Pervasive Software Jeff.Chapman@pervasive.com <mailto:Jeff.Chapman@pervasive.com>
Received on Monday, 26 February 2001 16:28:27 UTC