DASL and W3C XML-QUERY Requirements

At 01:31 PM 2/8/00 -0500, Massimo Marchiori wrote:
>The W3C XML Query Working Group has just published its first 
>public Working Draft "XML Query Requirements" at
>http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlquery-req

Thank you for informing  the DASL community about this document.

I am pleased to see that DASL compatibility listed as a desirable feature
for XML query.  

The requirements in your draft are a super-set of DASL's requirements.  If
you meet all of them, then XML Query will also be sufficient for DASL.   I
see no need to elaborate on those requirements.

I will  however  say that they seem quite extensive.  DASL at least could
get by with a far less ambitious XML Query than the one you have outlined.
In fact the only problem I can imagine would be if the final XML Query
design is both  very rich and not partitionable.  In DASL we've seen that
the general sentiment of the Internet community has been to keep things
simple.  If the XML query language were both large and entirely mandatory,
then undoubtedly some implementors would refuse to use it.

In particular, I hope it will not  be necessary that all XML query
processors support structural combinations (3.4.5)  and aggregation (3.4.6)
and  transformations (3.4.10).  So perhaps you can interpret this as
suggesting a meta-requirement: that the design of XML query be such that it
allows for clean subsets of functionality, so that one need only implement
as much as one requires, and not more.

If there is anything that I or the DASL community can do to assist you with
XML Query please do not hesitate to ask.

Regards

Jim Davis

Received on Friday, 11 February 2000 12:05:55 UTC