RE: [xml-dev] The use of XML syntax in XML Query

> >>>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:
> >
> >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.
>
> I'm not convinced that we need to remove the angle-bracket
> notation for
> element constructors. In queries that are not embedded in an
> XML document,
> I don't think that they cause users to be confused.


Is there a possibility of a solution in which the XML-like syntax becomes
pure XML, and is regarded as a preprocessor syntax, so that a query written
as a well-formed XML document (using element constructors for elements,
processing instructions for PIs, and comments for comments) can then be
translated mechanically into an XQuery expressed as a Unicode string, which
itself uses no XML-like constructs?

This would mean the Unicode-XQuery syntax wouldn't need to include all the
XML-like constructs, greatly simplifying parsing, while the XML-XQuery
syntax would be pure XML and therefore manipulable using all XML tools. The
translation from XML-XQuery to Unicode-XQuery could almost certainly be
specified and indeed implemented in XSLT.

I think this would also satisfy the real user requirement behind XQueryX.

OK, there's timescales. But the reason we put drafts out for comment is to
get comments!

Mike Kay

Received on Thursday, 3 January 2002 12:59:05 UTC