RE: Structure criteria for DASL queries

A point on terminology:

I don't believe the terminology in your e-mail is optimal.
In particular, I believe that calling the leaf nodes 
"strings" leads to confusion. For example, you state
below that "The current definitions for criteria operators 
(e.g. eq, lt, like) are defined only for strings". 
Clearly, many of us think that eq, lt, etc. are
not only defined for strings, they are also defined
for integers, reals, and datetimes, etc. Obviously,
there are at least two definitions for the word "string"
that apply in these types of discussions, and this
tends to produce confusion in the minds of some
readers.

In WebDAV, what is returned as a property value
is an XML-ized representation of the value. And, when 
viewing such an XML document as a tree, the non-leaf nodes
merely provide structure -- the actual values 
are at the leaf nodes. The leaf nodes are string-ized 
representations of basic data types, e.g., integer, real, 
datetime, string, etc. 

I object to calling the leaf nodes "strings". 
The beginning and ending tags of elements are "strings" 
in the same sense that the leaf nodes and everything else 
in all XML documents are "strings". This concept of 
"string" is simply not useful for purposes of our discussion,
and is easily confused with the basic data type "string".

I propose that we call the leaf nodes "leaf nodes" instead
of "strings". ("Element content" won't do, since elements
can have other elements as content.) This minor terminology
change will, I believe, eliminate this particular point of 
confusion.

Alan Babich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Davis [mailto:jdavis@parc.xerox.com]
> Sent: August 28, 1998 10:07 AM
> To: www-webdav-dasl@w3.org
> Subject: Structure criteria for DASL queries
> 
> 
> The purpose of this message is to make (or reopen) the case for
> defining a structure criteria (also called "structured query") in
> DASL.
> ...

Received on Friday, 28 August 1998 18:16:47 UTC