RE: Concern: XQuery <> valid XML

Jeff,

> If you want to construct queries on the fly, then the extraneous XML tags
> which you have to (gratuitously) insert are an obstacle, not help.
> People have been creating SQL queries on the fly easily for years
> (not that
> SQL is a good language, but it would look even worse, if
> expressed in XML :-).

SQL queries are usually constructed by textual operations such as
concatenation under full control of a full programming language. That yields
you of course all freedoms of arbitrary construction, but is error prone
etc.

If XQuery was XML itself, more structured construction becomes feasible,
e.g. by using the DOM API or XSLT. You trade freedom for standardization
here, of course. But is this all bad ? Was it a bad idea to give up GOTO and
assembler programming for structured languages ?

> In fact, I believe that XML Schema looks unnecessarily cumbersome
> (in part) because it is represented in XML. There is no good reason for it
> to be represented using XML syntax.

I have to second all the arguments brought here regarding the advantages of
an XML syntax, such as tool support, meta-data ability by mixing in
namespaces etc. They by far outweight the disadvantages of XML syntax, such
as new paradigm and bloated text form.

> I think it was a good decision to not use XML syntax for XQuery.

Please note that a W3C working draft does not indicate a decision, but is a
mere snapshot of ongoing work. It can change substantially at any point in
time. Also, notice that an XML syntax for XML query is required by the
Query-WG's requirements document. Thus I would not overestimate the content
of the current (and first) working draft.

Regards,
	Ingo Macherius

Received on Wednesday, 28 February 2001 07:33:01 UTC