Re: [css-gcpm] content() function doesn't allow formatting of values

[...]

A couple of possible (relatively minor) misunderstandings here I
think...


> Let me be clearer, though: there is no way we'd add XQuery to CSS.
Nor SQL for that matter, nor Python. XQuery is a fully-fledged languaged
used for applications, that sits on top of and extends XPath.

To be clear here, though, XQuery is not the same as XPath, and I don't
think anyone here is suggesting that XQuery be added to the Web
Platform.

XPath 1 is already in the browser, and there have in the past been XPath
hooks to CSS, although it would be better to use XPath 3, the current
version, rather than the 1999 XPath 1.

Better yet for CSS in some ways would be XSLT 3 match patterns, a subset
of XPath designed for streaming.

>  It's a
> redundant query language that browser's are not interested in. Following
> its *model* for something is possible, but I think it's far more useful to
> align with JS APIs, as authors in general are far more likely to be
> familiar with JS stuff.

A large part of XML's success (and sometimes its failing) is that it
allows document people, who often don't think of themselves as
programmers, to do fairly sophisticated text processing; not everyone
who works with documents wants to be a JavaScript programmer.

There's some interest from the XML side in documenting XPath (and maybe
XSLT) in the HTML 5 sort of way, and possibly coming up with a subset of
XPath 3 that's close to what browsers already implement (i.e. backwards
compatible but perhaps with some of the additional features that were
found to be needed over the years and that are in XPath 3). But I think
that's a separate conversation.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Monday, 16 June 2014 18:59:37 UTC