- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 11:49:47 -0500
- To: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@softwareag.com>, ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson), David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
- Cc: www-xml-query-comments@w3.org, xml-dev@lists.xml.org
At 10:46 AM -0500 1/3/02, Jonathan Robie wrote: >At 10:09 AM 1/3/2002 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: >>There are two ways to fix this: >> >>1. The XSLT solution: Make all XQueries complete, well-formed, XML documents > >XQueryX does that. Personally, I'm not sure that XQueryX is >something that users would want to write, so it is not the solution >to David's problem. > I agree, but that's because in large part XQueryX was deliberately not designed as a human authorable, human-readable syntax. I think XQueryX could be redone in a more user-friendly form if that were desired. >>2. The XPath solution: Make all XQueries look nothing like XML >>documents; i.e. no tags, no elements, no attributes > >Computed element constructor syntax allows this. Here is Henry's >example done in computed element constructor syntax, where the >wrapping element is in the XML document, and nothing in the query >per se looks like XML: > ><myQR> >element bib >{ > for $b in document("http://www.bn.com")/bib/book > where $b/publisher = "Addison-Wesley" and $b/@year > 1991 > return > element livre > { > attribute année { $b/@year }, > element créateur { $b/author }, > $b/title > } >} ></myQR> > I haven't seen this before. It does look like a possible solution. However, you still need to eliminate the non-computed element constructor syntax, which will still cause all the problems of user confusion on its own, even if a non-confusing alternative exists. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Thursday, 3 January 2002 11:51:04 UTC