Re: Concern: XQuery <> valid XML

Jim Davis <jrd3@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> At 02:02 PM 2/28/01 -0500, Michael Kifer wrote:
> >
> >Jim,
> >are you referring to the speed of parsing or to the difficulty of parsing.
> 
> The difficulty of creating the software that does the parsing.  At present, 
> we already have XML parsers, so it's zero effort.

Just to make it straight: having an XML parser != having a parser for a
programming language that uses XML syntax. An XML parser plays the role of
a tokenizer for such a language (well, maybe just a notch more).

> If I thought that  XML queries were only to be parsed by query optimizers, 
> and there will be only a few such created, then indeed the syntax would not 
> matter.  But in fact I believe there will be many applications constructed 
> that either create or process XML queries.  I think there will be hundreds 
> or thousands of (separately authored) programs that construct 
> queries.   And there will likewise be many programs that process XML 
> queries.  Consider for example how many meta-search engines there are for 
> current web-searches.

I don't see much benefit from XML for programs that construct queries from
scratch. However (as I said in a previous message) I do see a benefit for
programs that modify queries (or create them from templates).

I don't object to an alternative XML-based syntax per se. My comments were
perhaps too sweeping, which obscured the point that I was trying to make:
That the XML-based syntax is a tertiary and rather trivial issue, while some
earlier posts made it look (perhaps unintentionally) like a major hole in
the xquery proposal. This proposal (with which I am not affiliated) does
have some gaps to fill, but providing an XML-based syntax is not a
difficult exercise.



	regards
	  --michael

Received on Wednesday, 28 February 2001 17:19:51 UTC